NESCAC

[camosfan]

Bowdoin is a huge sleeper imo to get to the Elite 8. They compete with all the other nescac front runners and have players with tons of experience. Huck is a great player.

Huck, Steinberg and Duran are all quite capable.

[Kuiper]

NESCAC homer here.  But even I am not all in on the NESCAC (or any conference) getting 8 teams into the field.  As someone who has been involved with other conferences around the country (NCAC, Centennial, ODAC), 72% of one league getting in doesn't feel, in a word, fair.

Leads to the perpetual argument when selecting teams for a post-season tournament - are you trying to gather the BEST teams or the ones who are MOST DESERVING?  Sometimes, those objectives align, other times they don't.  In D1 Football at the moment, one could make the argument that the Georgia Bulldogs are probably one of the best 12 teams in the country (talent wise).  But, with their resume, are the deserving of a bid over some other teams? 

Curious to see how the conference as a whole does across the first weekend.

Agreed, it seems like a lot, hard to say what the best technique for sorting really is! Interestingly, on the women's soccer side, I think only four NESCAC teams are in. There must be lots of other teams routinely stronger and better than women's NESCAC teams for the NPI to spread it out more.

The key is having a concentration of very good teams that play each other.  NESCAC women's soccer's strength is too concentrated though.  It has about 6 good teams (Wesleyan is the highest in the final NPI at #19), but they have 5 that are #143 or higher.  The middle can't get higher if half their games are "bad" wins or ties (let alone losses).  UAA women's soccer got 6 into this year's tournament because the lowest in the entire conference is #70 and the next lowest is #42 (which missed the cut).  Having Wash U at #1 obviously helps everyone too. 

To get closer to 8 selected like in NESCAC men's soccer, you can't have more than a couple that are low and this year only Trinity (CT) falls into that category (#274).  The next lowest is Colby at #88

[Saint_Dad]

PN, you referred to NCAA div 1 basketball. They have 36 at large bids, to Div 3 soccer's 21 (43 AQs). Nescac was 33 percent of those bids. Div 1 basketball probably gets all of the top 60 teams in the country. Div 3 soccer let in all of the top 33. Number 34,35,37,38,40,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50 are all sitting home. The 34th ranked team is ranked higher than 31 teams in the tournament. This is of course because there are just so many AQs.
Div 1 soccer lets only 48 in, but 26 of those are at large.

I agree with Munnytim, there are many more deserving teams than a 7-6-3, or a 7-5-5 team. One that was 2-4-4 in conference. Come on, a team with 2 wins in 10 games, twice as many losses as wins, gets an at large bid?
Some of these other teams play in very good conferences and can't afford one bad game. Vassar had 3 losses and 3 ties on the season, two to top 55 opponents and one bad day against a dangerous in conference 160th ranked team. That loss dropped them from approx 20 to 40, and with a record of 12-3-3, would have missed the tourney if they didn't win their tournament in PKs. Plenty of stories like that.
Of course, there is always controversy about selection. This year its about the algorithm. Perhaps laying some rules over the algorithm is needed, along with some tweaks?
Kids want a chance to go the the NCAAs. I'm sure this year's selection has done even more to help the NESCAC conference with recruiting. Almost guaranteed a spot in the NCAAs.

[Newenglander]

I know there is outrage over the NESCAC but not sure how this is any different than the ACC in Division 1? they had 5 teams in the tournament last year and looking closer to 8 this year.

[SierraFD3soccer]

I know there is outrage over the NESCAC but not sure how this is any different than the ACC in Division 1? they had 5 teams in the tournament last year and looking closer to 8 this year.

5 of 15 ACC teams qual. last season and they also play close to 30 games in the season. Of the 5 who qual. each team had at least 21 wins. 1/3 which plays out 3-4 max out of 11 teams in NESCAC.

[Newenglander]

I know there is outrage over the NESCAC but not sure how this is any different than the ACC in Division 1? they had 5 teams in the tournament last year and looking closer to 8 this year.

5 of 15 ACC teams qual. last season and they also play close to 30 games in the season. Of the 5 who qual. each team had at least 21 wins. 1/3 which plays out 3-4 max out of 11 teams in NESCAC.

Looking at the RPI rankings through today and most teams have 17-20 games?

I was looking at number of teams in the tournament field vs looking at number of teams in the conference. Haven't looked at all the AQ's but if they have up to 8 (possibly 10 with NC state at 32?) it could be a larger percentage of the overall tournament field than NESCAC. 

[jsoxbo]

The Division 1 tournament is a total of 48 teams with the top 16 getting a first round bye, but the ACC usually sends the most teams to the NCAA as it is by-far the strongest overall conference in Division 1.

[CACDaddy]

Not sure I understand why the consistent abundance of NESCAC at large selections continues to get so much hate, especially when they perform in the tournament year-after-year. The NESCAC was won 6 of the past 10 national titles and had 3/8 elite eight teams last year. If you work out those proportions I'd argue they deserve 33% of the at-large selections. I want to watch the best teams duke it out in November, not some scrubs that make the tournament because they've never been before. I'd expect that trend to continue this year. The Bowdoin Polar Bears look lethal as of late; downing Tufts in the NESCAC quarters is no easy feat, especially in Medford. That obviously wouldn't have been possibly without the help of Oliver Bruce, the 6-1 173 lb striker specimen out of Chicago. He brings a unique aerobic endurance to the Bowdoin attack and played a crucial 9 minutes against Tufts and a critical additional minute against Middlebury. He deserves credit for Bowdoin's success this season and I anticipate that continues in the big dance.

[paclassic89]

Well, you're going to be watching some "scrubs" no matter what happens with the at-large selections given the AQ situation.  I don't disagree with the opinion that Bowdoin and Hamilton are both good teams, and having watched them, they don't park the bus.  They can play straight up with the top NESCAC teams and they do.   My main issue is the way the NPI algorithm is currently set up rewards draws against top teams more than it should (in my opinion).  If this is the way it's going to be going forward, it incentivizes teams to park the bus and not play for wins against top teams. 

From the NPI weights document
"The committee increased and set the QWB multiplier to .750 in order to address ties within the soccer
formulas that are different than a majority of other sports. By increasing the multiplier to .750 it made
the value of quality ties equal to or more valuable than average/below average wins. This again
encourages teams to play quality schedules and earn wins and/or ties against good opponents in order
to earn a spot in the NCAA tournament."

[Hopkins92]

I'm on record saying the NESCAC is the SEC of D3 soccer. (Probably broken record at this point.)

But with that said, respectfully, "I want to watch the best teams duke it out in November, not some scrubs that make the tournament because they've never been before."

Yikes, my guy, that is what gets people upset. There are a bunch of teams that finish 2nd or 3rd in their league and won the vast majority of their games, as opposed to a number of NESCAC teams that tie so much that they don't have 10 wins. And I get it, it's the best league in the land.

But saying a team that went 14-2-5 (York) would be considered "scrubs"... c'mon man.

And while I was typing, paclassic is on it. The real issue that waters down the tournament aren't the at-large, it's the AQs from some truly terrible conferences (no offense, but the glut of conferences with PSU-(fill in random PA town) and Pitt-(same thing) that go out and routinely give up double digit goals per game... I'm looking at you.)

The same thing is true in the D1 basketball. Every year we see a bunch of 14-16 seed teams from a conference you've never heard of getting blown off the court. The occasional upset or near upset is what makes the tournament special... But we all know the best 64(68) teams are not being put in those brackets every year.

[CACDaddy]

D3 XC National Meet Selection has it down. Instead of giving automatic bids to conference champions, they give an automatic bid to regional winners and select at-large teams based on regional performances, not conference ones. It consistently pits the 32 best squads against each other on the biggest stage. Not sure you can really adopt that format for soccer but it's worth thinking about for sure.

[jknezek]

D3 XC National Meet Selection has it down. Instead of giving automatic bids to conference champions, they give an automatic bid to regional winners and select at-large teams based on regional performances, not conference ones. It consistently pits the 32 best squads against each other on the biggest stage. Not sure you can really adopt that format for soccer but it's worth thinking about for sure.

Yeah. That works when everyone plays, or runs, against everyone. There are empirical times that tell you who the best team in the region is. In the case of soccer, York and Hamilton didn't play, have no significant common opponents, and no way to tell who is actually better. So that format is pretty much people just guessing.

We used to do regional rankings and then discuss one team from each region against the others before this season. Various regional committees focused on slightly different attributes and sometimes the national committee that did the final selection preferred one criteria over others.

NPI is at least empirical. That being said, I think the men's soccer decision makers set the dials slightly wrong. The women's dials seem a bit more reasonable to me.

I wonder if one of our friends who mimicked the NPI this season could redo the final men's list using the women's criteria and post the outcomes side by side. It would be interesting to see what less focus on QWB does to selections.

Men's Criteria:

Win%/SOS     15/85 
H/A Win/Loss   1.0/1.0
QWB        54.0
QWB Multiplier    .750
Overtime     100/0
Minimum Wins    10.0
                             

Women's Criteria:

Win%/SOS   20/80 
H/A Win/Loss    1.0/1.0
QWB     54.00
QWB Multiplier  0.500 
Overtime   100/0 
Minimum Wins   8.0
                   
Edited for formatting issues     

[Hopkins92]

I would LOVE to see that.

[camosfan]

But saying a team that went 14-2-5 (York) would be considered "scrubs"... c'mon man.
Was York more deserving than Montclair? I think there was a team from Connecticut, two years ago that was undefeated, yet was not invited.

[Hopkins92]

I'm not making the argument that any of the teams that finished in the 30s are "more deserving" than anyone, including the NESCAC teams. All I'm saying is that teams that finished in the top 50 (or thereabouts) shouldn't be labeled scrubs.

And I don't want to dwell on a throwaway sentence, as I know what the OP (on this topic) was saying.