Re: RPI 2011-12 Season: Posts on a Message Board
Did Brown beat top seeded Yale? Did Colgate beat top seeded Union? Looks like teams got hot at the right time. Cleaned up playing poker at ac last year. Hope my tickets are good in Providence. RPI record against Union & Yale was pretty good last year better than any one else?
I skipped over this post earlier.
I'll take a look into it later tonight. On a quick glance over the past two years (because apparently that's what we're limited to for sample size), I'd say we did pretty well against Union, but Yale might have a better record vs them by a smidge. Without even looking at Yale's schedule, I'd say it's a pretty good bet that we had the best record against the Elis.
So, it turns out I was half-right and half-wrong with my original guess.
In in-conference games over the past two years, only Dartmouth and Yale have winning records against Union. They both went 2-1-1. RPI is tied for 5th with Brown and Colgate with 0.250 winning percentages against Union.
But, burgie12, we've played Union 7 times in the past two seasons! You're right. And that brings our record up to 0.357 (2-4-1) in the past two years. If you consider non-playoff records against Union, that's good for 5th place. If you add in Union's play in the conference playoffs to their regular season record, RPI's .357 drops into 6th place behind Colgate based on Colgate winning the playoff series this March. No matter what way you slice it, we're about middle of the pack within the ECAC in record vs Union over the past two seasons.
If you narrow it to just the 2010-11 season, then that 0.500 record we posted last season was good for tied for second. Dartmouth went 1-0-1 and therefore posted the best record against Union.
On to Yale:
Both RPI and Union split the regular season against the Elis last season. No team won the season series against Yale. So, we tied for first.
Over the past two seasons, RPI has gone 3-1-0 against Yale. St. Lawrence posted a 0.500 record in regular season play, but lost the quarterfinal round to the Bulldogs this past season, so no other team can even claim a 0.500 record overall against Yale over the past two seasons.
Combined:
Yale went 2-1-1 against Union over the past two seasons and has the best cumulative record against Union and Yale. RPI's (4-4-0, 5-5-1) record is enough for second place. So, of the ten teams not named Union or Yale, the team with the best record against those two teams is RPI. Harvard had a (3-5-0, 3-5-0) record, good for second place. (By the way, Harvard went 0-4-0 this season, which means that they actually had a 3-1-0 record against the Bulldogs and Dutchmen in the 2009-10 season, which is pretty awesome and also indicates why we need a bigger sample size than one season.)
Other:
Using the power of pivot tables, I have found that Yale has the best record during conference play against teams that received a bye in that season's playoffs. They went 9-1-2 over the past two seasons against teams that finished seeded 1-4. No other team finished above 0.500. RPI's 0.406 (6-9-1) record was good for fourth place. That record was severely brought down by their performance against Cornell (0-3-1) over the past two seasons. Clarkson had the worst record at 1-15-0.
Wow, burgie12, it seems like you can pull a lot of seemingly random and highly specific stats out of whatever you're using. You're right, again! Man, 2-for-2! Last night I started putting together a spreadsheet that includes all of the college hockey schedules (only ECAC so far) from the past few seasons (two so far). Once I fill it out a little more (I'm thinking five seasons, to start), I'll add it to my Public Dropbox folder and send out a link (no, you don't need Dropbox to view it. It's probably what I'm going to do with the PtC standings, too) so that you can take a look at the results. Ever wonder "Hmm... I wonder who performed the best in "crunch time" (February / March / April) against teams that did really well in their conference (Top 4 finish) over the past five seasons in non-friendly environments (Neutral / Away only) and disregard all games against AHA / independent teams"? No? Just me? Well, if you do ever wonder that, then this spreadsheet is going to be for you. (BTW, Yale posted the best record over the past two seasons under that criteria (4-2-0). They went into Colgate and Cornell in February of 2010 and won both games, beat NoDak in the Regionals that year, and beat Cornell in Atlantic City this past March. They lost to BC in the Regional Finals in 2010 and also lost to UMD in the Regional Finals in 2011. They are the only team from the ECAC to have a winning record under the criteria I listed above. Union is 0-4-0 over that stretch while RPI is 0-2-1.)
(Yes, Hoky, I realized I just called myself a nerd.)