Re: Boston University Part IV: Off-Season or New Season?
I don't even think that's right. Had BU beat RPI, it would have change 1-3 at most PWC. They would still be on the outside looking in. I only see Possibly RPI and maybe Dartmouth. Where are these 6 comparisions that are being changed?
That came directly from this site:
http://slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/2011/rankings.diy.shtml. Change the BU RPI result, and that's what you get. FWIW, BU's RPI jumps from .5270 or something to .5353. Also, there are a lot of COp comparisons that involve RPI, plus the TUC change. Unfortunately, to show individual pairs on that site, it's ridiculously long, and I don't have time at work right now to figure out what changed. I imagine it's mostly COp. Our RPI heading into the tournaments was actually what kept us in, we were ranked as high as 12th at one point in the RPI. We were killed in the TUC and COp, and lost a lot of 2-1 comparisons, or 3-1 where we lost a heads up game, but had the RPI. So switching one category wins the pair, and the increased RPI from that game probably helps with a couple others. But I dont know.
I know...my comments weren't directed at you. I was agreeing with you, and in doing so, pointing out how ridiculous those comments sound when BU could have won any one or two of about ten other games and qualified. (the "makes perfect sense to me" was sarcastic...)
Not true. Stop making blind guesses. There are a couple of other games that if they had flipped we would have squeaked in at 15th. The point in bringing up the RPI game was how MUCH our seed would have changed with just one change in result. I brought the point up in the context of a discussion on the fluidity of the PWR system, and had nothing to do with "Oh boy, we were so close! Things aren't that bad! If only we won that game!!" Reread the discussion.
Exactly my point about this obsession with the PWR. Forget RPI. What about a loss and a tie to BROWN? What about a loss to HARVARD? What about losing three of the last five to Northeastern (and it they had won the last home game they wouldn't have even PLAYED Northeastern again)? Win games and the PWR takes care of itself. Or would you all rather go back to the "fairer" way of picking teams (letting a bunch of NCAA oldtimers in a smoke-filled back room write the names of teams they haven't even seen into a bracket)? When you lose 12 games and tie 8 (which comprises MORE than 50% of the games played), your chances of getting in aren't too good. I'll stop bringing up the importance of WINNING when everyone else stops bringing up the PWR.
Seriously, just stop. You're wrong on almost every word you're typing on this subject and are even being called out by the Parker bashers. Your points are totally off base and are in many cases rooted in complete inaccuracies. We were talking in the final weeks of the regular season about what our PWR standing was, and some made some guesstimates about what we'd need to do in the HE playoffs to get in. You were the one screaming and yelling that looking at the PWR at all was pointless and there should be no focus on that at all. This would be like a highly ranked college football team not paying any attention to the BCS rankings, which directly determine their birth in the national championship game. This is not like college basketball where the RPI provides a measuring stick for the selection committee that actually "selects" teams. Bball fans who sit around and try to calculate RPI's for their teams are engaging in the stupid activity you're talking about, because RPI is not what gets you into the tournament, it's what a bunch of guys in a room think. In this case, the PWR system IS what gets you in, aside of the autobid. There is no "selection" done by the selection committee, the name is a misnomer. Sure, the autobid was available, and we all continued to say that winning is the cure, but at the same time, we all knew that getting the autobid would be a huge task that would be very, very difficult for this team. Thus, we were talking about other possible ways into the tournament. I find it puzzling that you make comments in February saying the team will need to win the autobid to get in, revising it to say they won't perform well enough from here on out to get an at-large, but yet your comment then implies that the team, needing to win the autobid, has a shot to get it. That doesn't make sense.
If you look back, most of the discussions centered around, how much do we have to win to get in. So basically, we were talking about the same thing you were whining about, just win. You were complaining even before the UVM series how we should stop talking about how far in the HET we had to go, because we would definitely need the autobid. Well, you were wrong. And you're still wrong. We would NOT have had to win the HET had we defeated NU last Sunday. A win over UNH and loss to BC in the final would have gotten us in. This is again not a "OH WE WERE SO CLOSE!!!!" or any argument of our merit to receive an at-large (we didn't deserve one for the 1000th time), but simply a point that underscores how consistently wrong you have been in every fact-based argument you tried to make. We were never in a position where an autobid was necessary, and we were rationally discussing other possibilities, all centered around the "just win" philosophy.
Oh, sorry, I guess I must have just ****ed someone else off again...
