Thursday, March 22, 2007

A Little Love for the Computers

I wrote an article over at College Hockey News defending the process for selecting teams.
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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good column.

5:17 PM
Anonymous said...

Doesnt seem that where Maine or North Dakota ended up were the major issues people who complained took with the PWR, but rather they find fault either with teams being moved around for purposes of money or they feel PWR do an innacurate job of picking the bottom one or two teams to make it in the tournament. Not to say that attendance isn't neccesary for the sport, but those seem to be the two major issues compained about. Article did a nice job of dancing around those.

5:29 PM
Chris said...

There were only two changes to the field made that weren't by the numbers.

First, they switched #15 Air Force and #16 Alabama-Huntsville. That's not a huge change, in my opinion.

The other was putting Minnesota, Air Force, Michigan, and North Dakota in Denver instead of Grand Rapids. That doesn't change any match-ups, just location, and in my opinion, it was the more logical solution.

So not very much was changed "for purposes of money"

As far as who gets in and who doesn't, I thought I addressed it. I think the system does a fairly good job of measuring everyone's season and making that determination.

6:06 PM
Anonymous said...

Chris,

You make a good point about how every game matters, but you don't address the biggest issue, that some games matter a whole lot more than others for no particular reason.

There are plenty of examples, from the 25 v 26 TUC Cliff, to the lone common opponent game, and so on.

A more coherent approach such as KRACH also takes each and every game into consideration. That's part of the beauty of it: A team's KRACH rating perfectly 'post-dicts' that team's schedule.

6:47 PM
Anonymous said...

How can you honestly defend a system in which a team can benefit by losing a game? Example: had UND lost one game to MSU in the WCHA playoffs, Mankato would have likely remained a TUC, and UND's 5-1-1 record against them would have probably improved their seeding for the NCAA tourney. Instead, they swept them and were "penalized" for it by the current selection system.

Pairwise is highly flawed.

7:40 PM
Chris said...

The only reason a team would benefit from losing is because of the TUC cliff, which I've argued against many times this year.

That doesn't mean the whole system should be thrown out. It just needs a few minor fixes.

8:28 PM

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