Big Green with Envy

The press conference after the Harvard women's hockey team's 3-2 overtime loss to Dartmouth left no doubt that the Big Green envies Harvard's talent.

"I think we've proven that we're a better team than Harvard," Dartmouth junior winger Carrie Sekela said. "We have more depth and a better goalie. We know that they're a one-line team."

I'm sure that Sekela, a Big Green third-line player, would love to imagine that if she played for Harvard, she'd actually get a moment of playing time. But probably deep down she knows that if her team's first line were nearly half as talented as Harvard's, she'd be calling Dartmouth a one-line team.

Amy Ferguson, the Big Green's amazing freshman goalie, boasts a spectacular 9-7-0 record on the season. In Sekela's eyes, she is far superior to Harvard's 17-3-3 Crystal Springer. While describing a save made in overtime, Ferguson made a fairly nasty comment about Harvard sophomore defender Angela Ruggiero.

"I knew [Ruggiero] was going high glove on me," Ferguson said. "She's the kind of player that needs to beat you with a pretty goal."

Ruggiero, a 1998 Olympic Gold Medalist, must have deeply offended Ferguson by actually playing to the best of her ability. Clearly in Ferguson's eyes, Ruggiero has no right to use her Olympic-level talent to beat a college-level player.

Well, Ferguson and Sekela can be happy that they won this round. Maybe in 2002, they can watch the Olympics together on television. As they watch the Harvard alumni playing for Team Canada and Team USA, they can take pleasure in reliving the day they actually triumphed over them. It'll be kind of like listening to Al Bundy describe his four touchdowns in a single high school football game.

Ferguson and Sekela will both be back next year, as well as the vast majority of the Harvard and Dartmouth players. In Saturday's game, the worst punishment of any Big Green player occurred when freshman Carly Haggard was cross-checked into the Harvard net soon after the game's first goal. Dartmouth should deservedly be in for much worse when the two teams meet for the first time next season.

Lying with Statistics

The pervasive theory around Harvard seems to be that the Crimson didn't make the four-team cut for the AWCHA tournament mainly because of the selection committee's desire to set up an East-West championship game.

"How could Minnesota, a team ranked behind us all year, suddenly jump ahead of us and into the tournament?" junior Tammy Shewchuk said.

According to an AWCHA press release, selection "is based on a criteria that includes record, strength-of-schedule, and head-to-head competition."

Harvard is certain that, if the AWCHA were honest, it would have included geography on that list.

But at least one Western team believes that the selection committee made its decision objectively

"I think they were as objective as possible," Minnesota Coach Laura Halldorson said. "They were going to upset somebody no matter whom they picked."

Harvard is without a doubt one of the top four teams in the country. Nobody on the team doubts that. Nobody who has ever watched Harvard play with any consistency should ever doubt that.

Likely the major factor going against Harvard's selection was statistics, not politics. That is what Halldorson believes.

"I think you have to look at record against common opponents and things like that," Halldorson said. "We performed well against a lot of the Eastern teams. We beat Brown, too."

Against common opponents, Harvard was 7-4-3. Minnesota was 12-3-0.

Considering the recent trend in college sports to overuse statistics to determine tournament fields (note the Bowl Championship Series in Division 1-A Football) it is fairly likely that the above statistic was a big reason why Harvard wasn't selected.

Another overly used, unreliable statistical measure is the Ratings Percentage Index, which the men's basketball and hockey selection committees use to make the NCAA selections and seedings in March. The RPI is calculated based on a weighted average of a team's record, the summed records of a team's opponents, and the summed records of a team's opponent's opponents.

When the AWCHA mentions picking teams based on "record and strength of schedule" it's a pretty safe bet that it is referring to the RPI.

For most of the season, Minnesota was ahead of Harvard in the RPI, despite trailing Harvard in the polls. In the final RPI tally, Minnesota was No. 2 and Harvard was No. 3.

Head-to-head, Harvard won 8-3 at Minnesota on Nov. 7. After the game, Halldorson acknowledged that Minnesota was completely unable to keep up with the speed of Harvard's top line.

Clearly this game was not weighted as much as Harvard's three head-to-head losses to Dartmouth because it came so early in the season. This is a pretty typical practice of all college selection committees.

So the selection committee does have a statistical argument for taking Minnesota over Harvard. Now I'll show why the statistics lie.

First of all, the RPI is a stupid system to use in college hockey, men's or women's. It works pretty well in basketball, where there are many conferences and teams play almost half their games out of conference. But it isn't like that in women's hockey. There are only two conferences, and few games out of conference. Harvard, for instance, played just two games against non-ECAC opponents.

The selection committee likely used something like the RPI to justify the belief that the WCHA was as strong as the ECAC and worthy of just as many berths in the national tournament. This is a terrible justification, because there simply weren't enough non-conference games for the RPI to accurately reflect the weakness of the Western teams.

The record against common opponents seems to favor Minnesota. But Minnesota played five games against Wisconsin, which finished third in the WCHA. Harvard played only one. That warps the statistics. Wins against Wisconsin were pretty easy to come by. The Badgers are a team that lost 15-0 to Northeastern and 13-2 to Dartmouth earlier in the year.

Against common ECAC opponents, Harvard was 6-4-3, and Minnesota was 7-3-0. I would hope that the selection committee at least looked at this statistic, which still slightly favors Minnesota.

But when missing players are taken into account, it becomes clear that Harvard had the better season. For instance, Harvard was missing Crystal Springer, Kalen Ingram, and Kiirsten Suurkask in its first loss to Dartmouth, while Brown was missing Tara Mounsey in its loss at Minnesota. The Golden Gophers had absolutely no kind of adversity to play through.

I seriously doubt that the selection committee looked deeply enough into the statistics. Likely the committee blindly stood by them, because it backed the false notion that East-West parity actually exists in women's college hockey. In other words, the committee used objective statistics to pick the two at-large teams, but failed to objectively analyze whether its stats were actually valid.