February 2, 2023
by Adam Wodon/Managing Editor (@CHN_AdamWodon)
For some inane reason, Stonehill’s exclusion from the Pairwise — officially decided yesterday by the Men’s Ice Hockey Committee, but more or less a foregone conclusion for a while — set off a frenzy among some people.
In the past, the rule has been that even teams that are not eligible for the NCAA Tournament (say, St. Thomas this year) are still included in the Pairwise calculation for any games played vs. D-I opponents.
Stonehill is a special case this year because it will only play five D-I games — three against Long Island and two against Lindenwood. And has only played one such game so far, a 7-1 loss to Long Island.
There are two good reasons for excluding Stonehill.
One … Calculating its Pairwise is a headache, and not even mathematically “correct,” at the moment. Any inclusion of Stonehill prior to today necessitated a math hack just so their RPI wouldn’t divide by zero. The nature of the hack was totally arbitrary. We hacked in a solution, but then decided to take Stonehill out of it entirely a while, anticipating this change.
Two … It’s one thing to play 20 D-I games as you ramp up and aren’t eligible for the NCAAs yet — like, say, Arizona State a number of years back. Stonehill, on the other hand, doesn’t care. It has a measly five games scheduled, all against other teams in the bottom 10 percent of the Pairwise. Stonehill has shown no interest in being part of the D-I hockey community. No one there returns any calls and inquiries to speak with them. They haven’t attempted to upgrade their schedule. And they basically were thrown into D-I against their will. Stonehill will lose every game they play, and it doesn’t care.
Honestly, factor No. 1 is a bigger deal, but factor No. 2 makes me not worry about it.
Meanwhile, today, there were some people — not namings names at the moment, but they are representatives of some bubble teams — who decided to go off on this.
Somehow, they got it stuck in their head that removing Stonehill now significantly altered the Pairwise. And therefore, this kind of move should not have been made so late in the game. One school AD went so far as to say his team would’ve made its schedule differently had it known about the Stonehill decision.
I’m going to break down the myriad ways these comments are absurd.
But before that, let me clear another thing up. I think…
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