Oh my...I guess I should be honored that you quoted me in your article. But I had to go back and correct a couple of mistakes. LOL
Hahaha I felt bad singling you out but the quote was too good not to use -- also I figured we get along well enough where you wouldn't have gotten too mad haha
I am literally asking this as hockey fan. It’s not an attack. Like you, I’m a passionate hockey fan.
What is the voting process? I understand Berlo and Crowley had to recuse themselves at times.
In normal years does the committee have control over who gets in or are they just setting matchups based on pairwise and minimizing flights?
So in practice, they've always straight-up used the top eight in the Pairwise (other than autobids) to set the field. They do have flexibility to not take a team if they don't think that team is worthy, but they've never done it. Humorously
I once asked the committee chair (Sarah Fraser at the time) about the Pairwise and she said this:
I don't know if USCHO created the Pairwise, they very well might have, but somebody did, and that's not the same system or the same numbers that the NCAA looks at. Mathematically it could be the same, but we don't use the Pairwise ever.
...which is obviously wrong, of course they use the Pairwise, even if they may not call it that. The handbook literally spells out "H2H wins are worth one point, RPI is worth one point, record against common opponents is worth one point."
So anyway while the committee does have the ability move things around as they see fit, they've pretty much never done so
other than in 2016 (same as the Sarah Fraser link) when they said that they felt Princeton was the stronger team even thought he Pairwise had Northeastern ahead. Personally, I think they may have been just using that as an excuse to save travel money, but that's what she said.
In theory, they are just supposed to be setting matchups based on Pairwise and minimizing flights. But they do have discretion, even if it is rarely (if ever) used. Like I said though they've never broken from the Pairwise on who to actually allow into the field.
the committee failed to do what was right, and rather fell back on historical perceptions.
You know, honestly, I sympathize with this. The field should solely and exclusively be chosen based on this year's performance, full stop. The problem though is that this year, with no non-conference games, you are absolutely forced to do one of two things:
(1) You have to treat all the conferences as equal, or
(2) You have to look back at how strong each conference has been historically and go from there.
No matter how good someone might be at the "eye test," there's nobody out there capable of watching every game to determine that Conference X was better than Conference Y this year without subconsciously using information gleaned from prior years with interconference matchups.
For a while, I was -- and honestly still am -- wondering if there would have been some merit in the committee just saying "screw it, let's just use the Pairwise, flawed as it is, and set the field that way, even though all the conferences will be treated like they're equal, since we shouldn't use prior year performance as a guide." It would have been unfair in its own way, but at least it would have been an objective metric. But the committee obviously didn't want to use a flawed metric as its guide, which is fair -- so in the end you don't have any other option but to fall back on historical performance.
