Expand The Brackets?

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Re: Expand The Brackets?

No expansion is needed. If your team can't make the tourney under the PWR system in the top quartile of 58 NCAA teams or by winning the conference tourney (the second chance opportunity), your team doesn't deserve to be dancing. Period.

DU was the last team left out of the dance in 2006 and 2007, and the team didn't deserve a berth.

The PWR system is transparent, and every team knows exactly what they need to do to secure a spot.

I agree completely.

The tournament is fine the way it is. The regular season should mean something.

The way I look at it, the National Tournament begins with the Conference Tournaments. The Conference Tournaments give EVERY TEAM (except the 9th and 10 place teams in HE), regardless of how mediocre their regular season performance, a second chance. They can get in the National Tournament by winning their Conference Tournament.

Perhaps Providence and Northeastern have a beef, since they're the only teams that didn't get a "second chance", but I hope they have enough pride to admit that they don't really deserve the chance.

How many opportunities should mediocre teams get?

[RedFreak]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

I agree completely.

The tournament is fine the way it is. The regular season should mean something.

The way I look at it, the National Tournament begins with the Conference Tournaments. The Conference Tournaments give EVERY TEAM (except the 9th and 10 place teams in HE), regardless of how mediocre their regular season performance, a second chance. They can get in the National Tournament by winning their Conference Tournament.

Perhaps Providence and Northeastern have a beef, since they're the only teams that didn't get a "second chance", but I hope they have enough pride to admit that they don't really deserve the chance.

How many opportunities should mediocre teams get?

I also agree with this POV. The NCAA Tournament shouldn't be a freakin' lottery. You should have to earn your way in.

[alfablue]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

How about a triple-elimination tournament?

Aggregate score is better. And easier to fit into a weekend- no pesky Sunday games.

We can win 5-1 one day, and loose 6-4 and still win 9-7. Go back to the really old days of college hockey.

[MaizeRage]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

I wouldn't expand the number of teams. In fact, they should probably go back to 12 if UAH has to drop hockey.

I wouldn't mind seeing the tournament lengthened by another week to go back to best-of-3 series in the first two rounds, but the odds of that happening are slim to none.

I love the current system for the very reason you specified here. It's just unbiased numbers. To quote the Scoobs: Simple Math.

Until the committee breaks form from the PWR, we have no one bickering about bubble teams getting in because of "quality wins" or all the other BS you hear about with the basketball tourney.

There aren't any polling numbers used, like the BCS. The numbers don't factor in anything besides wins and losses. The only "bias" possible is in how we chose the weight factors for RPI and in how we define a TUC. Both of those factors are settled before the season begins. The selection process is pretty much as unbiased as determining the field for the Stanley Cup playoffs.

The only argument I've ever seen that's worth having is whether we should use KRACH instead of RPI. Every other complaint has been soundly rejected by 90% of this board. What's not to like about that?

Thank God they are numbers. If a human being compared BU against Minnesota-Duluth and came up with the determination that BU had the better season, that person would be called a moron, and probably never allowed to make that kind of determination again. But if you put numbers to it, no matter how ridiculous, inaccurate, or ill-conceived, it's some great system.

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

Thank God they are numbers. If a human being compared BU against Minnesota-Duluth and came up with the determination that BU had the better season, that person would be called a moron, and probably never allowed to make that kind of determination again. But if you put numbers to it, no matter how ridiculous, inaccurate, or ill-conceived, it's some great system.

Subjective is subjective. Objective is objective. Not hard to understand at all.

[bigblue_dl]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

This one would be the bestest:

http://www.bracketmaker.com/tmenu.cf...356779&tclass=

[Montelena]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

Don't waste our time with this. Please do us all a favor and delete this thread. If anything let's contract the field to 12.

[4four4]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

I think the opposite should happen. They should just have the conference winners play in a tournament. If you can't win your own conference, you don't deserve crap.

Only conference champions should be playing in the NCAA.

[WILD E WOLVERINE]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

I favor 12 teams..with the 1 seed getting a bye till the regional final

No going back - 12 teams meaning a team could possibly need only 3 wins for a national championship...no way. I like the 16, if college hockey expands expand the tournament.

[Freddie]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

No matter how many or how few teams are in the field, there are always going to be one or two teams that just missed the cut.

Sixteen teams is plenty, and is actually well beyond the NCAA's normal ratio of total teams to tournament bids.

I'm sympathetic to Ferris' plight, but saying that they missed out "because of two close losses" is a gross over simplification. Are you suggesting that 'goal differential' should be considered? Do you really want to open that can of worms? Ferris' weak non-conference schedule and being permanently clustered with a perennially weak team like Western Michigan dealt them a severe handicap.

I do think that the model used to create the RPI gives too much weight to the "opponent's opponents" winning percentage, and not enough weight to the team's own record.

[French Rage]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

What we need is a system that combines a formula resulting from a team's record combined with its opponent's and opponent's opponent's record, along with its record against other highly rated teams (say 25 or so) and its record against the same opponent's that another team played, then compare each highly rated team so see who wins the most of them, then take the top 16 or so, removing those at the bottom to be replaced by team who won some sort of bid awarded by their conference for whatever the conference wants, possibly some postseason tournament of some sort, then split those teams into bands and place one team from each band at a separate location.

We can call this system Billy and the Clone-a-sauras.

[jonnyquest]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

How can anyone talk about expanding the tourney field since we've lost four programs and a conference since 2003?

[bigmrg74]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

We need to worry about having more D-I programs such that we can justify the 16-team field before we even think of asking for something beyond that. Get to 64 teams (that's 6 more programs, assuming no one else folds) and we're good with what we got.

I think we'd need to get to 70 teams before we even dream of an 18 team field, 80 teams before we think of a 20 team field.

Agreed. Personally, I think it would be a great move for College Hockey, Inc. to get together with all of the hockey booster clubs across the land. You have them chip in like one percent of what they all give to their own school, pool that money together to set up endowments at schools to fund Hockey where it would be a pretty logical fit, or even have had it in the past. You set it up so that the endowment would be for the establishment and funding of a college hockey program, and usable for both men's and women's teams. You would have to think it would pretty dang hard for an athletic director to say no to adding a Men's hockey if a women's program would already be paid for before they even sold a ticket or advertising space on a program. I would say that somewhere around $20,000 a year would be a good amount to seed a new endowment every year, and clearly, College Hockey Inc. could work with boosters of those targeted schools in getting them to contribute even more cash into that endowment, so that they would eventually have enough to be able to fund a major portion of a hockey program, and in general, help more of a grass roots organization to bring College Hockey to that campus. Probably at some of the bigger schools, like Penn State and Syracuse, you could probably start off with a little less perhaps, like maybe just $10,000. Might just depend on what individual schools rules are on starting endowments perhaps.

Just to throw out some names on the schools that I would like to see targeted......
PSU, Syracuse, Pitt, Cincinnati, Louisville, Kentucky, Chicago, Kent State, Wayne State, Grand Valley State, Central Michigan, North Dakota State, Iowa, Colorado, Colorado State, Oregon, Montana. You nudge the ball a little at these schools, and College Hockey would be a lot better off than what it at right now. And then you can talk about expanding the brackets more.

[kdiff77]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

I didn't read through the entire thread, so forgive me if this has been mentioned already. But instead of expanding it to 20 or whatever, I think a good compromise would be a play-in game between the lowest non-AQ and the first team out (AKA #17). I'm not positive who that'd be this year (Maine? Ferris? Union?), but I'm not really sure Vermont deserves to be in the tournament, so I think it'd be fair if they played the first team out to see which SHOULD be in the tournament.

Is anyone REALLY going to argue against more hockey being played?!

[Kepler]

Re: Expand The Brackets?

I didn't read through the entire thread, so forgive me if this has been mentioned already. But instead of expanding it to 20 or whatever, I think a good compromise would be a play-in game between the lowest non-AQ and the first team out (AKA #17). I'm not positive who that'd be this year (Maine? Ferris? Union?), but I'm not really sure Vermont deserves to be in the tournament, so I think it'd be fair if they played the first team out to see which SHOULD be in the tournament.

Is anyone REALLY going to argue against more hockey being played?!

That puts a significant delimiter between 15 and 16. Most years that sort of difference is probably not justified.