Well, Mark Lewin beat me to the punch; that'll teach me to write my emails offline. :-) Here are my comments on the Fanter interview: So, during one of the intermissions of the Cornell-Union game, I switched over to WRPI and caught the tail end of an interview with Jeff Fanter. When I tuned in, he was talking about the ECAC F*n*l F*v*, saying that the issue was not so much whether there were four or five teams in Placid but whether there were eight or ten teams in the playoffs, since the ECAC would never go back to the Tuesday night preliminary games. He said that the league was too deep to exclude the #9 and #10 teams from the playoffs. (I guess he's too young to remember when there were 8 teams out of 17 in the ECAC playoffs.) I think a little healthy competition among borderline teams for the eigth place spot would be fine; would it have been unfair to exclude Vermont and SLU last season? Unfortunately, the ratchet effect will probably keep us at 10 teams for a while. He also gave the usual spiel about letting one more team in on the Lake Placid experience, and talked about all the side attractions they're adding to the ECACs to give more to the fans, since this league likes to distinguish itself as fan-friendly, yadda yadda yadda. As I see it, the F*n*l F*v* is a lot worse for the fans, since they have to go to Placid a day earlier to see the whole tournament, probably taking an extra day off from work (Friday-Saturday-Sunday would be a different story). Plus, and this is the big one, fans of 2/5 of the teams in the tournament have an even chance of seeing their team play only once, and then having to decide whether to watch the other four duke it out or just go home. On the topic of the upcoming ECAC/Hockey East doubleheader, Fanter did his best to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear: Hartford is a new market, Yale and Princeton are nearby, etc. Pretty much the only thing he could say there. Fanter also talked about radio broadcasts on the internet. He said they're already up there now (he said "all", but really it's more like half the teams), but the ECAC wants to provide direct links from its homepage to the broadcasts. This is a very good idea; Eric Carlson already has a page with such links for all the Division I games and I was thinking of adding such a section to my weekly ECAC report. For Cornell, Brown, Union, RPI and Clarkson, there's a static link right to the broadcast, but there might be problems with Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Harvard is only on Audionet, which now has a different .ram address for each game, and might also object if one of the conferences provided a direct link to the feed which people would ordinarily only reach after a maze of advertising-laden Audionet pages. Princeton has been using long, unguessable .ram addresses which change every weekend, presumbly to deter people from linking directly, and Yale is only broadcasting a couple of games a year, although a little bookkeeping could determine which those are and then link straight to WYBC for each of them. Similarly for WRUV's occasional Catamount broadcasts. He also mentioned that the ECAC Game of the Week would be on the net, apparently referring to the Empire/NESN package. Couldn't tell if he meant video or just audio. Finally, he was asked about the ECAC's respectable out-of-conference performance this year. I think there was also mention of the lack of an ECAC team in the Top Ten, because his answer involved not getting too excited until the RPI numbers start coming out in a few months. (Of course, the RPI can be calculated now; it's not like it doesn't exist until USCHO starts posting it, but it is not terribly meaningful until more teams have played each other.) Would anyone who heard more of the interview like to comment further? John Whelan, Cornell '91 [log in to unmask] http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/ Attention ECAC: Eight is Enough--Flush the Final Five! HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.