The flip side to this is, would you rather the "smoke-filled room" setup?
The advantage of the PWR is you can always know where you are and where you will be. There's multiple websites where you can input future game results and it'll give you an accurate PWR field. There's also no opportunity for big conference bias, etc.
I don't know which is better, but PWR does check boxes that the selection committee concept does not.
I’m not sure how much the smoke filled room is a fact vs a myth. Is the first team out goingingbto complain? Sure. But then again when a team wins 2 against a team rated higher and loses ground you might want to look at the system. They keep winning and maybe we’ll finish ahead of them!
I also kind of disagree on the big conference bias. By design it favors them because it is biased toward Strength of Schedule and HEA is always going to have a stronger one than AHA and mostly better than the ECAC. A good AHA team almost needs to be lucky in its non-conference scheduling to get a sniff of an at-large. If Holy Cross was really good this year, they’d be penalized because they scheduled us instead of Maine, even though we were supposed to be a top 20 team. If they played us and Harvard, 2 teams projected to contend for a bid but who had awful years, they are penalized. On paper their non-conference schedule looks formidable. UConn, UML, Merrimack who went to the tourney last year. Turned out all 3 stink this year. And they aren’t getting more than an occasional game with BC or BU. Those guys play maybe one or 2 AHA games/season. I’m not advocating for Holy Cross. I’m just picking them as an example of how smaller programs can get hurt even if they try to “do the right thing.” Then last year there was the Stonehill issue. Another case of cooking the books. I actually agreed that Stonehill should not have counted. But that decision should have been made in October not March. That’s like saying we are counting games against Canadian teams then changing your mind after the games are played. It wasn’t that hard to see who they were playing in October!
www.uconnhockeyhub.com
