Sorry, Dick, but your argument is based on two unwarranted assumptions: * Assumption #1: that one game can tell us anything about who should be in the tournament. The question at hand is not whether Quinnipiac would stand a snowball's chance in hell in the NCAAs, but whether they deserve to be there given their performance this season. Mankato, judging from their performance before the weekend, overcame 8-to-1 odds in beating North Dakota, but that doesn't mean that a 17-to-1 longshot like Quinnipiac should get a free ride to the tournament in the face of other considerations. * Assumption #2: that the ratings percentage index is a good indicator of a team's strength even in the presence of disconnected schedules. RPI is an ad-hoc attempt to gauge a team's performance and strength of schedule by combining their winning percentage and those of their opponents and opponents' opponents'. It becomes inaccurate quickly when teams' schedules are "balkanized" since opponents' winning percentage becomes a poor measure of schedule strength. The NCAA recognized this weakness and this stressed the committee's prerogative to overrule the RPI and pairwise based on conference strength. Yes, there is a process in place, and it includes judging whether a group of teams who predominantly only play each other has an unreasonably high RPI due to a lack of competitive equity. I would prefer that the NCAA in the future use a criterion which is robust enough not to need overruling in these situations. Ken Butler's KRACH rating system seems to do what RPI was intended to do, and do it better, by determining a list of relative strengths which would predict each teams' winning percentage given its schedule. With no preconceptions of who the "establishment" is or even who is in which conference, it does automatically what the committee will have to do by hand this year: compare the MAAC teams' performances against the independents with those of the rest of Division I and judge each team's success against their schedule accordingly. According to that measure, Niagara, who have the worst RPI of any team without a losing record, are 4/5 as good as Mankato. Mankato are twice as good as Quinnipiac, three times as good as UConn and almost five times as good as Holy Cross. And Mankato themselves are less than half as good as the teams on the bubble. (All of this is excluding games against Nebraska-Omaha and before last night's game, which of course improved Mankato's ranking noticeably.) The moral is that by a more robust statistical measure Quinnipiac and UConn are a lot worse than the #9 and #18 figures you quote by blindly following the RPI. Finally, your MAAC-vs-"establishment" comparison further pads its numbers by comparing the MAAC teams (and Niagara) to UMD, Merrimack, Lake State and Brown, teams whose only chance at even qualifying as "teams under consideration" for the NCAA tournament is to win their conference tournaments. Those four teams place a lot lower in the RPI than the MAAC teams (although according to the KRACH Duluth is around the level of Quinnipiac and the other three are comparable to Niagara), but to make the tournament each needs to advance through a conference playoff system which is seeded against them and probably get past some of the top 10 team in the country. In comparison you are proposing that Quinnipiac be awarded a bid if they win three games against teams ranked even lower than themselves. All of these opponents have KRACH ratings less than half that of Northeastern, who did not even qualify for the Hockey East tournament. Before you respond that KRACH is not the system used by the NCAA to judge the performance of teams, let me re-iterate my main point that while the NCAA uses RPI, they are also aware of its weaknesses in the face of the MAAC schedule, and have provided themselves with the leeway to override the RPI. I am appealing to the KRACH, which appears not to suffer from those weaknesses, to demonstrate that using the "MAAC escape clause" would indeed be reasonable and fair. In fact, I think it would be unfair not to. John Whelan, Cornell '91 [log in to unmask] http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/ HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.