Nathan Hampton writes: >The only good basic plan would be to combine the ECAC and new MAAC and >give them one, maybe two entrants (given the ECAC's 0-6 record over two >years, 0-3 this year, etc., etc., etc. First of all, get your facts straight. The ECAC went 1-3 last year, so that makes them 1-6 over the last two, not 0-6. And the year before that they were 2-3, including an overtime loss on a questionable goal in the national semifinal. Second, with a 16-team tourney, the issue of the four established conferences getting two bids each is even less of an issue. How often has the ECAC failed to have two teams in the top fifteen? RPI in 1995 is the only example I can think of, and their ticket to the tourney was an automatic bid for winning the ECACs, just like anyone else in the other three conferences could get. This year Princeton made the NCAAs as the ECAC champion, but they would have made the field based on their final pairwise numbers anyway. The last ECAC team to make the NCAAs thanks purely to an auto bid was Cornell in 1996; they were the #12 team, but they needed the auto bid because an even lower ranked Providence team won the Hockey East tournament. How about the automatic bye rule which could unfairly displace a Hockey East team if the same team won the ECAC RS and tournament championships? Well, the only team ever to benefit from it was BU last year, and it allowed them to take a bye away from Vermont; otherwise two ECAC teams would have gotten byes that year based on the pairwise. I'll grant you that the ECAC's performance in recent national tournaments has been anemic, but a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that our most frequent standard-bearer is a classic underacheiver come playoff time. (Both ECAC and NCAA.) Let's not start making insulting suggestions about taking away ECAC bids; the ECAC hasn't put a sub-top-twelve squad into the NCAAs since 1995. > Better yet, let every team in the nation into a pre-regional >tournament and make all of them play into the regional. That's more or less what the conference playoffs are. Everyone has a shot at an automatic bid, except three CCHA, two ECAC and one HE team. Which is the conference that insists on letting *all* its teams into the playoffs? Hmmm... John Whelan, Cornell '91 <[log in to unmask]> <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/joe.html> Learn about the NCAA selection process on the web at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?pairwise HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.