Re: Fun With Numbers '14-'15: USCHO Posters Poll, Pairwise What-Ifs, and Other Goodie
Exactly, BC is ahead of the curve. The coaches knew in advance that Cornell, Harvard, BU and Northeastern wouldn't be playing well this season and scheduled accordingly. I heard that BC is also kicking itself for scheduling Quinnipiac, thinking Quinny would be a cake walk.
This.
The problem with BC's schedule this year isn't its OOC games -- it's that Hockey East is godawful.
Out of conference teams, in PWR/KRACH:
Quinnipiac -- 4/4
Harvard -- 5/5
SLU -- 11/10
Cornell -- 12/13 (and obviously climbing back up after their disastrous start)
Princeton -- 17/15 (meh)
Dartmouth -- 17/17 (meh)
Yale -- NR/21 (meh)
Would I prefer to have scheduled Clarkson and Mercyhurst over Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale? Absolutely. But the facts are:
1) All but one of our OOC games are against TUCs, and Dartmouth is fractions of a point away from being one (and was one before we dropkicked them off the TUC cliff),
2) We don't know who's going to be good 1-2 years before the season when these things often get scheduled,
3) Minnesota and Wisconsin will not play us,
4) Flying out to the midwest to play the middling WCHA teams costs a lot of money when there are comparable eastern teams we can bus to,
5) Literally the only eastern teams that are TUCs that we aren't playing this year are Clarkson, Mercyhurst, and Penn State.
Our schedule is our schedule. We're playing 7 games against the 3 best non-Minny/Wisco teams in the PWR this season (not to mention 2 against Cornell, who seems to have found its footing). The bottom of our schedule freaking
blows something serious but the top of our schedule is just fine.