jimdahl

50? I would have said 101010.

Yeah, you weren't supposed to try to read that part. That's a scenario that has Yale get swept and lose a comparison; the format of the game results is what needs to be plugged into Whelan's PWR calculator. Just believing me that the scenario exists is probably a lot easier.

That's what I get for being optimistic. Has G.F. ever had a notable economic development success? Sigh.

It's not quite THAT bad . Much like UND, since Yale doesn't play a potential TUC this weekend, they can severely limit their downside by losing, so they don't have to face a TUC going forward. However, it's also not that hard to come up with (unlikely?) scenarios in which Yale loses this weekend and loses a comparison. For example, Union is currently losing the comparison to Yale 1-3. COP is a tie and can easily go to Union this weekend. All Union needs to flip the comparison is take RPI. That can happen in this weekend's scheduled games alone, as listed at the bottom. The scenario I listed at the bottom ends up with BC and Yale each losing one comparison with Yale taking the head to head comparison but BC with the RPI advantage, so most still think BC would get the nod, dropping Yale to #2 overall. Of course, that doesn't help UND much, but it drives home the point that there are a ton of edge cases that are quite difficult to detect looking at one weekend, let alone trying to project across two weekends with multiple reseedings and thus unknown opponents. In handy "plug into TBRW" format (as of the time of this writing, real outcomes ended on 20110306): 20110307 Ya 0 SL 1 NC 20110308 Ya 0 SL 1 NC 20110307 ND 1 MT 0 NC 20110308 ND 0 MT 1 NC 20110307 BC 1 MA 0 NC 20110308 BC 1 MA 0 NC 20110307 Mi 1 BG 0 NC 20110308 Mi 1 BG 0 NC 20110307 DU 1 Mk 0 NC 20110308 DU 1 Mk 0 NC 20110307 MD 1 SC 0 NC 20110308 MD 0 SC 1 NC 20110307 Nt 1 LS 0 NC 20110308 Nt 1 LS 0 NC 20110307 Un 1 Cg 0 NC 20110308 Un 1 Cg 0 NC 20110307 Mm 0 Ak 1 NC 20110308 Mm 0 Ak 1 NC 20110307 NO 0 BS 1 NC 20110308 NO 0 BS 1 NC 20110307 Mn 0 AA 1 NC 20110308 Mn 0 AA 2 NC 20110307 Mr 1 Me 0 NC 20110308 Mr 1 Me 0 NC 20110307 NH 1 Vt 0 NC 20110308 NH 1 Vt 0 NC 20110307 CC 0 Wi 1 NC 20110308 CC 0 Wi 1 NC 20110307 WM 1 FS 0 NC 20110308 WM 1 FS 0 NC 20110307 BU 1 NE 0 NC 20110308 BU 1 NE 0 NC 20110307 Da 0 Ha 1 NC 20110308 Da 0 Ha 1 NC 20110307 Qn 0 Cr 1 NC 20110308 Qn 0 Cr 1 NC 20110307 RT 1 AI 0 NC 20110308 RT 1 AI 0 NC 20110307 AF 1 SH 0 NC 20110308 AF 0 SH 1 NC 20110307 Mh 1 Ct 0 NC 20110308 Mh 0 Ct 1 NC 20110307 HC 1 Ca 0 NC 20110308 HC 0 Ca 1 NC[/code]

Yep, in addition to that one I'd add to Minnesota's wish list: Ferris St. over W. Michigan (take RPI, flip the comparison w/W. Michigan) Merrimack over Maine (take RPI, flip the comparison w/Maine) Harvard over Dartmouth (take RPI, can flip the comparison w/Dartmouth by also taking TUC) Wisconsin over CC (don't want CC to take RPI and the comparison) Like I said, it seems wide open for the Gophers. They could be anywhere from 9th to 23rd after this weekend's scheduled games, alone. With a sweep, anything from 12-16 is reasonably likely.

I just haven't said much because what people are saying is right and it's hard to add much to it. Whelan's calculator works great and can be a lot of fun to play around with. However, you do need to remember that you're punching in the outcomes of 63 remaining games (the number could grow if any of the WCHA play-ins split). That leaves a minimum of something like 9,223,372 trillion possible outcomes, so there are probably quite a few you'll miss. Of course, a lot of those don't matter much, and it's easy to look at a team like UND's PWR and figure out everything that could flip. Minnesota, however, has at least a dozen comparisons that could easily flip; not to mention the added impact of the TUC-cliff uncertainty given their .4600 record vs. TUCs. Minnesota is firmly on the bubble, we should know a lot more about exactly what they need to do after this weekend.

I remember reading an article about this network on some financial or business site earlier this season. All those game notes are actually machine-generated from the stats, right? I remember being pretty impressed by the technology, and more than a little worried for local sportswriters

Really, guys, Hitler talk? Sheesh.

<div>Drop the TUC criterion (it would just be capturing win/loss, which is already in RPI) so you're left with RPI, COP, and H2H and you get something like this:</div> <table style="width: 250px"> <tr><th>Rank</th><th>Team</th><th>Comparisons<br>Won</th> <th>Real PWR Rank</th> </tr> <tr><td>T1</td><td>UND</td><td>56</td> <td>3</td> </tr> <tr><td>T1</td><td>Yale</td><td>56</td> <td>1</td> </tr> <tr><td>3</td><td>Boston College</td><td>55</td> <td>2</td> </tr> <tr><td>4</td><td>Michigan</td><td>53</td> <td>4</td> </tr> <tr><td>T5</td><td>Denver</td><td>52</td> <td>5</td> </tr> <tr><td>T5</td><td>Union</td><td>52</td> <td>6</td> </tr> <tr><td>7</td><td>Notre Dame</td><td>51</td> <td>10</td> </tr> <tr><td>8</td><td>Miami</td><td>50</td> <td>9</td> </tr> <tr><td>9</td><td>UMD</td><td>49</td> <td>11</td> </tr> <tr><td>10</td><td>Merrimack</td><td>48</td> <td>8</td> </tr> <tr><td>T11</td><td>New Hampshire</td><td>46</td> <td>12</td> </tr> <tr><td>T11</td><td>Nebraska-Omaha</td><td>46</td> <td>7</td> </tr> <tr><td>T13</td><td>Maine</td><td>44</td> <td>18</td> </tr> <tr><td>T13</td><td>Boston University</td><td>44</td> <td>16</td> </tr> <tr><td>T15</td><td>Western Michigan</td><td>43</td> <td>14</td> </tr> <tr><td>T15</td><td>Dartmouth</td><td>43</td> <td>13</td> </tr> <tr><td>17</td><td>UMN</td><td>41</td> <td>19</td> </tr> <tr><td>18</td><td>UW</td><td>40</td> <td>23</td> </tr> <tr><td>19</td><td>CC</td><td>39</td> <td>15</td> </tr> <tr><td>20</td><td>Rensselaer</td><td>39</td> <td>17</td> </tr> <tr><td>T21</td><td>Alaska</td><td>37</td> <td>21</td> </tr> <tr><td>T21</td><td>SCSU</td><td>37</td> <td>20</td> </tr> <tr><td>23</td><td>AA</td><td>35</td> <td>24</td> </tr> <tr><td>24</td><td>Princeton</td><td>34</td> <td>26</td> </tr> <tr><td>25</td><td>Ferris State</td><td>33</td> <td>22</td> </tr> <tr><td>26</td><td>RIT</td><td>31</td> <td>27</td> </tr> <tr><td>27</td><td>Quinnipiac</td><td>30</td> <td>25</td> </tr> <tr><td>28</td><td>Mankato</td><td>30</td> <td>28</td> </tr> <tr><td>29</td><td>Cornell</td><td>29</td> <td>29</td> </tr> <tr><td>30</td><td>Air Force</td><td>28</td> <td>30</td> </tr> <tr><td>T31</td><td>Robert Morris</td><td>27</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>T31</td><td>Bemidji State</td><td>27</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>33</td><td>Niagara</td><td>25</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>34</td><td>Michigan State</td><td>24</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>35</td><td>Lake Superior</td><td>24</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>36</td><td>Northern Michigan</td><td>21</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>37</td><td>Northeastern</td><td>21</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>38</td><td>Ohio State</td><td>20</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>39</td><td>Clarkson</td><td>19</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>40</td><td>Brown</td><td>18</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>41</td><td>Mercyhurst</td><td>17</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>T42</td><td>St. Lawrence</td><td>15</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>T42</td><td>Holy Cross</td><td>15</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>44</td><td>Vermont</td><td>14</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>45</td><td>Providence</td><td>13</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>46</td><td>Harvard</td><td>13</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>47</td><td>Canisius</td><td>12</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>T48</td><td>Connecticut</td><td>10</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>T48</td><td>Bowling Green</td><td>10</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>50</td><td>Massachusetts</td><td>8</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>51</td><td>Colgate</td><td>8</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>52</td><td>Bentley</td><td>6</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>53</td><td>Army</td><td>5</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>54</td><td>MTech</td><td>4</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>55</td><td>Mass.-Lowell</td><td>3</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>56</td><td>Sacred Heart</td><td>2</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>57</td><td>American Int'l</td><td>1</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> <tr><td>58</td><td>Alabama-Huntsville</td><td>0</td> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </table> By dropping TUC, UND would take the comparisons to BC and Yale because both would become 1-1 and UND would have the RPI tie-breaker. UND's only lost comparison would be Maine, which Maine would win 2-1 (because of H2H).

So, UND would have won the comparison with Dartmouth with an additional .002 in RPI. What really jumps out at me looking at the women's RPI is how many teams have games thrown out for being negative wins. By the end of the men's season, there are usually only 3 or 4. In women's, 11 of the top 12 (everyone but North Dakota) have wins thrown out for being negative. What's particularly annoying about this is that Dartmouth had only a slightly better win% (22-11-0 .6667 vs. 20-13-3 .5972), but since UND played the 2nd toughest schedule and Dartmouth the 21st, Dartmouth had "negative wins" thrown out. Without throwing out the negative wins, UND wins the RPI and the comparison and gets the nod. It's not immediately apparent to me how the unusual RPI weighting (30-24-46) plays into this, but it is really quite odd.

Toews' past two years have been just an amazing success story, awesome to see. Speaking of annoying the haters... Ovie seems to be getting his mojo back. A point in 8 of the last 9 games for the first time this season (though uncharacteristically compared to past years, mostly assists). I hope the adversity this year leads to a different playoff result than coasting to the President's Trophy did last year!

Adding my voice to the chorus of "yeps". The WCHA itself is pretty explicit. 2011 Red Baron™ WCHA Final Five Information Teams are seeded into fixed brackets for the Final Five.

Bummer. Thanks for the updates.

No access to webcast for me, so major scoring updates appreciated

Huh. Apparently it's a per-forum setting and at some point the default changed so newer forums had it while older forums didn't. All fixed.

I used to complain a lot about this sort of thing (e.g. "Dear Mr. McFeely") but decided it's just a cultural difference. Traditional media tend not to acknowledge competitors or their scoops. When WDAZ sees something interesting in the Herald, they don't feel the need to say "we saw in the Herald...". Instead they run out and try to duplicate the story, feeling freely entitled to report on the same facts as the Herald did, without attribution to the idea having come from the Herald. It makes sense if you think of them as competitors. On a lot of Internet communications, the culture is to give credit to where you discovered something. If one of us saw an interesting link on GPL, we wouldn't just come post it here with our own commentary, we'd repost it and say "saw this on GPL". People don't take the game lines and post them without attribution, they post "from Brad's blog" or "from UND's Twitter". You don't just copy interesting links from other people tweets and tweet them with your own headline, you RT them. Since the Herald and WDAZ stories appear online, it's a little jarring when they don't follow online social conventions, but those stories are written for the traditional media. When guys like Brad write posts for their blogs or Twitter, they do a lot more linking and acknowledging of sources.

A couple updates: Shoutbox. The profile "status" feature is now available in the sidebar as a shoutbox. If you've previously hidden the sidebar (as I had) you can unhide it from the main page by clicking the little green widget with the white left-facing double arrows on the right-hand side of the screen (should be almost straight to the right of the "UND Sports" header). Chat. Just to the right of "Members" in the green navigation bar near the top is a "Chat" link. When someone else is in the chat room, a highlighted number will appear next to the word, AND the "who's online" list at the bottom of the forum now also contains a list of who's in the chat room. I'm still not sure what it's role would be, given that the gameday threads and cover-it-live have game coverage handled pretty well, but I'm happy to give it a shot.

Another boring weekend for the Sioux on the PWR front (though winning is still desirable). I also did similar outlooks for Minnesota, Wisconsin, St. Cloud, Nebraska-Omaha, Minnesota-Duluth, and Denver in a tour of the WCHA blog post. Go Beavers!

Wodon's overview is nice: Bracket ABCs: Regular-Season Conclusion Edition

There's a habit on some sites of anticipating that your own post was overly long and detailed, and including a one-line summary titled "tl;dr" (too long, didn't read) for those who had the good sense not to dive into your post. I've been trying to cap my PWR posts with one-line summaries, but this time split the important stuff across the last sentence of two paragraphs. More succinctly... While Denver could take UND in PWR, they would pretty much need ALL of the following to happen: Denver draws Bemidji in the opening round and sweeps, AA and Robert Morris also lose, UND loses at least one (preferably more) games vs. MTech AND loses opening game of the Final Five, and Denver wins at least one WCHA Final Five game vs. a TUC.

I think he might have been hinting at this, but Denver gaining the TUC-cliff ground and getting enough wins vs. TUCs strike me as nearly mutually exclusive. Restating the present, the TUC records right now are 23-7-3 vs. 15-7-3, so Denver quite simply needs to gain 8 wins. It can gain 1 by UAA and BSU dropping below .500, 2 more if Robert Morris drops below .500. Give them 2 vs. SCSU this weekend, they still need 3. An opening round sweep of Mankato, BSU, or AA would knock any of those three out of being a TUC, setting Denver back 1-0 or 1-0-1 vs. UND for AA or Mankato (whom UND has only played three times and twice), BUT ahead 2 for BSU (who Denver only played twice). So, Denver could probably take TUC if: they matched up with Bemidji in the opening round and swept, AA and Robert Morris also lost, UND gets bounced in the opening game of the Final Five, and Denver wins at least one game vs. a TUC. If all that happens, they still need RPI. 2 wins vs SCSU, dropping the now negative win vs. MTech, 2 wins vs. BSU, and 1 win against (say) UND would get them up to about .569. They basically need UND to lose to MTech.

I agree, assuming today's RPI, we can get two wins vs. TUCs and Yale one loss. That brings us to .75 vs .7432, leaving TUC and the overall comparison with Yale. However, the TUC cliff could make all the difference. I'm not sure how fargosioux's scenario plays out, but Quinnipiac could be key in another way, too. It look like 2 losses drops Quinnipiac below .500 in RPI (all other things equal), thus becoming a non-TUC, thus taking away 2 TUC wins from Yale. That, plus some favorable tournament outcomes, could give the TUC criterion and the overall comparison to UND. Cornell is another possibility for dropping out of TUCness with a tournament loss to Colgate. Of course, UND has its own TUC-cliff issues. AA would drop below .500 RPI if swept, as would Bemidji St. Robert Morris would drop below .500 RPI if it lost the opening game. So, the odds still definitely favor Yale in the individual comparison. Less likely, but also possible -- UND could also pass Yale, while losing the comparison, if Yale lost two other comparisons (assuming, as most people think, that the tie-breaker is the comparison instead of RPI; otherwise, Yale losing one would be enough). Union could easily take the comparison w/Yale -- their COPs are identical and each will face COPs in the tournament, and an H2H is quite possible. Since Yale has such a strong RPI, it's tough to find another because any team other than UND would really need to flip two criteria.

Good question. The original gameday chat question from five years ago has been covered pretty well by cover-it-live. That has its pros and cons -- the pretty minor con is that it's really more "live blogging" than pure chat room (by design, the Herald and UND guys are kind of the hosts, and everyone else guests), the biggest pro is that it's a social medium in which you can interact with the Herald and UND athletics information people (though since they now venture out into unmoderated social media like twitter, it sure would be nice if they started interacting instead of just lurking and reading here -- the largest dedicated social media specifically dedicated to UND athletics -- but I digress...) However, chat or a shoutbox for other times, and to improve interaction with other fans is a good idea. I've been very interested in and done some work (some of it not yet seen) on integrating other social media into the site, but adding some of those capabilities to the site itself and seeing what takes catches on is worth looking into.