Selection Show Grades
By Fetch
The selection show is in the books, and naturally there are plenty of complaints to go around. So why not add my two cents.
C to ESPN overall. I am sure everyone wants a more than half hour selection show, but the baseball selection show only gets 30 minutes as well, and they have to go through 64 teams and the College World Series draws more viewers than the Frozen Four, so I don’t have any complaints there. For not watching much college hockey all year (I am assuming), Buccigross and Melrose did fairly well with the teams and players. I would have liked to have seen more analysis and what not, but nothing is perfect.
F to the selection committee. It is horrible that New Hampshire gets to stay at home while BC gets shipped out west, and that Miami, one of the hottest teams in the country, gets sent out East. It is perhaps even worse that the committee set up second round matchups such as North Dakota-Denver and Yale-Union. And of course some of the WCHA conspiracy theorists will complain that the committee screwed their conference again. Though this year I think it has more legs than in year’s past given that the league’s two best teams would meet in the round of 8 if they both win their first game.
F to the people complaining about only a couple teams getting attention (I am looking at a certain UMD fan). i.e. saying that they might as well put Yale-Union in the final 8 and they might as well put UND in the Frozen Four with all the attention they are getting. But it is a 24ish minute selection show with commercials. And the analysts need to have their picks and whatnot. That would leave 1 minute (or less) per team for analysis. That isn’t very constructive.
D to the Pairwise. I am all for having objective criteria, especially given how bad the basketball committee was, but you can’t convince me RPI deserves to go over Dartmouth or Cornell, for starters.
A to Union coach Nate Leaman for being such a good sport about the technical difficulties when ESPN went back to him for the interview later. And for mentioning that they have to beat Duluth before possibly meeting Yale.
A to North Dakota for even being awake at 10:45 to watch the show. I am guessing they didn’t get back to Grand Forks until about 6 in the morning, and I doubt much sleeping went on on that bus given the adrenaline they must have had after winning the conference title.
Incomplete (I guess) for this current system of regionals. It’s not fair that New Hampshire gets to host and BC gets sent out West. I do think that attendance will be higher with UNH there than BC, but I also don’t think attendance is a big priority, especially not over having a fair and even field. The two proposals to fix it that I have seen are to have conferences host the regionals, which I think is a better idea, or to host the first two rounds at campus sites, which I think is a bad idea. That would give 1 seeds two home games, which I think is too much of an advantage. The whole notion of a postseason is semi-thrown out the window that way. This isn’t women’s basketball where attendance is going to be that bad if it is at a neutral site. Plus the tickets are relatively cheap for the regionals.