FB: New England Small College Athletic Conference

[NescacOutsider]

Oh, and I forgot COTY - whatever happens in the last two weeks, EJ Mills has to be the guy.  For a team with mediocre expectations to be 7-0, with five games that went down to the wire and could have gone either way but where Amherst made all the big plays down the stretch, is super impressive.  No one would say Amherst has more talent than Trinity or Wesleyan ...

Mills, like him or not, has been the best coach in this league for many years.

Congrats to Coach Mills on the lifetime achievement award. I think some might argue that Coach Devanney, and perhaps Coach Dicenzo, have been at/near the top over the past decade as the Mammoths are on pace for their best season since  2018 having averaged less than four wins a season since.

[lumbercat]

Oh, and I forgot COTY - whatever happens in the last two weeks, EJ Mills has to be the guy.  For a team with mediocre expectations to be 7-0, with five games that went down to the wire and could have gone either way but where Amherst made all the big plays down the stretch, is super impressive.  No one would say Amherst has more talent than Trinity or Wesleyan ...

Mills, like him or not, has been the best coach in this league for many years.

Congrats to Coach Mills on the lifetime achievement award. I think some might argue that Coach Devanney, and perhaps Coach Dicenzo, have been at/near the top over the past decade as the Mammoths are on pace for their best season since  2018 having averaged less than four wins a season since.

Give Mills the Trinity or Wesleyan personnel since 2018 along with their operating budgets and admissions officers and you would see more championships than either of those great programs.

[JEFFFAN]

What Lumbercat said ...

[Trin9-0]

I stumbled across the official NESCAC Football Tie-breaking Procedures for determining which team earns the conference's NCAA playoff bid in the event of a tie:

• Best record among tied teams, against one another (head-to-head).
• Comparison of results of conference games played against top 4 teams (including all teams at the 4th spot).
• Comparison of results of conference games played against top 8 teams (including all teams at the 8th spot).
• Comparison of results of conference games played against conference teams in rank order. Comparisons shall be made one team at a time starting with the highest ranked team.
• If the tie remains after comparing results against the highest ranked team, the results against the next team in rank order shall be used. This process is continued until a winner is determined.
• Coin flip or similar random action involving all tied teams (names being pulled out of a hat-the first team pulled will be the automatic qualifier).

Interesting that they will continue awarding "Co-Champion" and "Tri-Champion" status and only use the tie-breaker for the AQ bid process. Obviously, in the case of two teams finishing with the same record head-to-head is the determining factor.

The dreaded "random action" is the sixth and final option. However, in the event that three Championship teams are tied with a single round-robin style loss then literally pulling a name out of a hat is their solution to determine the Automatic Qualifier. GROSS!

Additionally, if I'm interpreting this correctly, then I also vehemently disagree with the most likely 3-way tie-breaking scenario for teams with 2 losses. For example; let's say Trinity, Wesleyan and Williams all finish 7-2.

Trinity's losses are to Williams and Middlebury (who finishes 6-3, 4th place)
Williams' losses are to Wesleyan and Amherst (who finishes 5-4, 5th place)
Wesleyan's losses are to Trinity and Bates (who finishes 2-7, 8th place)

In this scenario Wesleyan, who would have by far the worst loss of the three championship teams, would get the AQ playoff bid. Trinity who had the least egregious defeat, a loss to 4th place Middlebury, would be the first team eliminated. Then Williams would be eliminated due to their head-to-head loss to Wes.

Is it me or is this completely backwards? Shouldn't the team with the worst loss be eliminated first?
Am I interpreting this correctly? What are everyone else's thoughts?

I realize there's not many good ways to break a three-way tie but rewarding a team for the poorest result is baffling. For what it's worth, my preference for breaking a three-way tie among championship teams with more than 1 loss is point differential among in the games played between the Championship teams.

The Amherst victory over Wesleyan got me thinking about the possibility of a three-way tie and then it hit me! I think I figured out the rationale behind the NESCAC's absurd tie-breaker rules. As you can see above, essentially the team with the worst loss gets the automatic bid... therefore I think the league is trying to maximize the possibility of getting an at large bid by awarding the automatic berth to the team which would theoretically have the lowest NPI.

The problem is this would only take place in the event of a 3-way tie where each team has at least two losses and it's unlikely that any 2-loss NESCAC team would even qualify for an at large bid so if my theory is correct then the league would actually be doing itself a disservice.

Also, keep in mind that in the event of a 3-way tie where each team's only loss is to one of the other 1 loss teams they literally pull a name out of a hat! I'm sure we'll all handle that very well if Wes wins out and Trinity beats Midd & Amherst and the Mammoths beat Tufts & Williams.

Do other leagues have similar tie-breaking rules? Will the pulling of a name out of a hat be livestreamed? Will Nescacman pull the name? So many questions!

As a follow up to this; I reached out to Logan Hansen to ask what the numbers would show in a scenario where Trinity, Wesleyan, and Amherst all finish the season at 8-1. His response:

They would be very likely to get all three in. Here are each teams' odds under that scenario (odds aren't all the same because of each team's number of home games & who they played home/away):
Trinity: 97.2%
Wesleyan: 99.9%
Amherst: 93.7%