In the spirit of November, arguably the most important month for college football, I want to develop a likeness between the Bowl Championship Series (college football’s version of the chaos theory) and Hockey East, home to our own Terrier hockey team.
For starters, the computers used to compile the BCS rankings have very complex formulas either that, or they were put together by monkeys throwing feces at each other. They take into account many factors, including the opponent’s winning percentage and the temperature at game time, among other important things.
Included in the computer average number are rankings from Anderson ‘ Hester, Richard Billingsley, New York Times, USA Today…(and the list keeps going). The computers go through millions of algorithms to figure out a simple 12-team ranking used to determine the four most important college football games of the year.
And if the Hockey East had this system?
Well, the computer names would have to be switched. The New York Times would become The Boston Globe computer, the Anderson and Hester computer the Jerry York ‘very, very cool’ computer, the Richard Billingsley would become the Jack Parker ‘I’m-the-best-coach-in-college-hockey’ computer, and so on. Since Parker has the most talent and clout, you would not need an average of all the computers, so essentially you can throw the rest out.
Furthermore, teams in the BCS place their hopes on their schedules. Each year in the off-season, coaches and athletic directors of the best programs around devise a schedule that will allow them to best the computer system, while still leaving enough easy opponents for relaxing weeks. The goal is create a tough out-of-conference list and add it to the existing intra-conference one.
According to ABCSports.com, this is how it works: ‘[It] is calculated by determining the cumulative won/loss records of the team’s opponent (66.6 percent) and the cumulative won/loss records of the teams’ opponents (33.3 percent).’ Seriously, did anyone outside of the Nuclear Physics department understand that?
Why confuse the whole country with some crazy number system when all you have to do is notice the conference in which each team plays? Ranking the conferences for 2003, you would naturally put the Big 12 first, then the Big 10, Pac-10, SEC, ACC and lastly, the Big East (Miami and Virginia Tech cannot make a conference great by themselves). Now if you try this simplistic system in the Hockey East, how does it look? Frightening.
Wildcats and Eagles and Bears, oh my!
It is unbelievable how hard the conference schedule is this year. BU plays 23 games within the conference. These games include opponents such as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Maine and Boston College (three games each) all ranked in the U.S. College Hockey Online’s Top 10. The Icedogs’ out-of-league schedule includes two games against the defending national champion Minnesota Golden Gophers and a matchup with fellow top-15 team Harvard. The strength of the BU hockey schedule is terrifying enough to make a grown man wet his jock strap.
Along with this pressure, the Terriers throw in that wonderful break in the schedule during February otherwise known as the Beanpot Tournament (this is not actually a break in fact the team also adds a game against Providence in between, just for good measure). In the Hockey East, it’s easy to see that trying to get through the conference schedule is like playing in an extra NCAA Tournament, only without the champagne and tall brown plaque as the endgame.
Lastly, everything does not go by wins and losses in the BCS; in other words, teams do not control their own destinies. How terrible is this? A team that loses in September has a better shot at the national title than a team that loses near Thanksgiving. Huh? A loss is a loss, right? Depends on who you lose to, right? Tell that to the University of Southern California.
USC can get passed in the polls even if its one-loss record remains through the end of the season. According to Brad Edwards of ESPN, ‘If [Ohio State] can reach No. 3 [in the polls], it would have a one-point deficit to USC in average poll ranking that would need to be overcome through the other elements of the BCS formula.’
In Hockey East, it’s all about the wins and losses. It is near impossible to pull an Oklahoma and win each and every game in conference no one is that dominant in college hockey. But this weekend’s loss by the Terriers could determine a place in the playoffs come March. This weekend might determine whether they have to win two games against New Hampshire in the last two games of the regular season.
That kind of pressure is what college hockey (and college sports in general) should be about. The way things work in Hockey East should be the way all college sports work. The BCS should learn some things from the conference in pilgrim country.
But that is a lost cause because of the one overriding factor that makes the eyes of the NCAA and those of the BU Board of Trustees light up like Christmas trees: money.
Nikhil Bramhavar, a senior in Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, is a weekly sports columnist for The Daily Free Press.
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