Fixing Section Seeding?

The Latest 400 or so Topics

Moderators: Mitch Hawker, east hockey, karl(east)

goldy313
Posts: 3949
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:56 am

Post by goldy313 » Sun Feb 19, 2017 12:51 am

green4 wrote:
goldy313 wrote:If you are Dodge County it is one game, if you are Lakeville North though it is 5 games, 20% of your games aren't going be competitive. I think it would be best to leave it up to each region to determine how they seed or schedule.

A clarification on football, districts were put in place to make sure every team played 8 games in 8 weeks. Districts and sections are, in many cases, entirely different, i.e. section 1AAAA has six schools from 3 different districts, so does 2 AAAAA. Since you only play schools in your district during the regular season there is a huge unknown come playoffs because there are so few intrasection games.
Lol remember when you said 1AA was better than 8AA, that narrative seems to have changed in this thread
I qualified that with state tournament performance which i stand by.

Section 8 guy
Posts: 540
Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2012 9:04 pm

Post by Section 8 guy » Sun Feb 19, 2017 12:27 pm

You might want to check you're history. Maybe expand your research a bit beyond the last three or four years. To come on a high school hockey board and brag about the success of Section 1 at the State Tournament is laughable.

Rich Clarke
Posts: 126
Joined: Thu Dec 10, 2009 8:40 am

Post by Rich Clarke » Sun Feb 19, 2017 5:00 pm

The problem is counting games against section opponents much more significantly than other regular season games. I suspect this policy was enacted to eliminate subjective arguments, but adults not trying to game the system should have no problem seeding teams somewhat honestly. The point is to reward each team in proportion to their season accomplishments and have the better team seeded higher. At least I would hope so.

Focusing on section games only led to the absurd result of Cloquet being seeded ahead of Grand Rapids, a team that someone pointed out beat both EP and Edina and swept the Lake Conference. Indeed, this seeding is the one that appears to have section seven fans in a lather, and rightly so. If you're Elk River, who would you rather face in the semis? GR may be coming apart or finally recovering from the flu, but who would want to face Micah Miller's crew over a middling Cloquet squad? And of course East would rather play Cloquet. There's just no way this happens if coaches vote based on all games and who they honestly see as the better team. I'm not saying one should ignore head to head games, and they should definitely be given somewhat higher weight all things being equal, but even if Cloquet had swept GR instead of split, they're not the better team, and Mike Randolph has to be grinning ear to ear (even with a 5-0 win over Grand Rapids under his belt).

But despite all of this, and as interesting as the debate is, I hope that Elk River is the least concerned of anyone about this. They aren't screwed just because they have to beat one weaker team instead of another. They are the best team and if they lose it'll be on them regardless of how the system isn't set up to produce the best nine teams in order, but instead based on a handful of "section" games.

greenwayraider
Posts: 747
Joined: Fri Jan 29, 2016 6:54 am
Location: Bovey

Post by greenwayraider » Sun Feb 19, 2017 5:20 pm

redtundra wrote:
ndirishfighting wrote:Where do you see and did you hear there are no districts for AA Bantams?
Every district I have clicked on has a district tournament for each level.

Then this has changed. When my son played Bantam AA a couple years ago, they went from the regular season right to regions.. No district tournament. May have changed. I liked it at the time because it seemed to get to the games that mattered faster.
In looking at the Minnesota Hockey website there are District tournaments for Bantam A with the top two finishers advancing to Regions. For Bantam AA the state is divided into North, South, East and West Regions. No District Tournaments that I can see.

spamtownusa
Posts: 63
Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2013 2:26 pm

Post by spamtownusa » Sun Feb 19, 2017 6:25 pm

District 8 starting Bantam AA tourney today. Top 7 of 10 teams go to regions. Bottom 3 are done.

HShockeywatcher
Posts: 6848
Joined: Thu Aug 31, 2006 10:21 pm

Post by HShockeywatcher » Sun Feb 19, 2017 9:46 pm

karl(east) wrote:...

I'd also add that this doesn't necessarily mean that conferences have to die. If a group of teams wants to go on playing each other twice a year and give themselves a banner at the end of it, I don't see why they can't do that. They just have to get the section games in, too.

And while there are other ideas that may or not make section playoffs better (like the Bantams example), this works very comfortably with the existing structure. It would not be at all hard to implement.
So, do you think this change should happen for AA or for both classes? I could see this being quite easy for AA; there is one section with 10 teams, the rest with 7-9. You could do this for the last X games of the season for everyone in the section, there may be a few throw away games, but that's fine. But Class A? There are some big sections and lots of games that neither team would normally schedule...

How about "you have to play all of the teams within 2 seeds of you last year" or something along those lines? Mandating that teams so far apart play each other doesn't do much for either program.

goldy313
Posts: 3949
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:56 am

Post by goldy313 » Sun Feb 19, 2017 10:48 pm

Section 8 guy wrote:You might want to check you're history. Maybe expand your research a bit beyond the last three or four years. To come on a high school hockey board and brag about the success of Section 1 at the State Tournament is laughable.
Who has more state championships in the last 40 years?
Section 1 :D

Ok, expand to top 3.....section 8 has 13, section 1 has 12.

Honestly, you have to go back to the 1950's to make your argument and even then John Marshall wasn't in region 1 until 1967-1968, they were in region 3.

History.....really......better know it to cite it.....

Section 8 guy
Posts: 540
Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2012 9:04 pm

Post by Section 8 guy » Mon Feb 20, 2017 10:14 pm

Umm No! Glad you spent your whole day drumming up false facts tho.

And besides.....Rogers > Dodge County!!!!! \:D/ =; [-X

goldy313
Posts: 3949
Joined: Tue Mar 05, 2002 11:56 am

Post by goldy313 » Mon Feb 20, 2017 10:34 pm

Section 8 guy wrote:Umm No! Glad you spent your whole day drumming up false facts tho.

And besides.....Rogers > Dodge County!!!!! \:D/ =; [-X
What is false?

HappyHockeyFan
Posts: 926
Joined: Sun Nov 30, 2008 11:55 pm
Location: Lakeville

Post by HappyHockeyFan » Tue Feb 21, 2017 3:50 am

Just get rid of conferences, keep the A and AA sections, each team plays each team in their section twice and then schedules whoever they want for the rest of their schedule. Too many games wasted on AA vs A anyway. Hill-Murray/St Thomas vs Simley/Sibley, what a waste for all teams involved. Plus top players would/could play more top competition every game during the season which would help development. Add to that 20 minute periods and were good!
It's not the Best players, it's the Right players! HB

Traxler
Posts: 677
Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2013 12:18 pm
Location: Rosemount

Post by Traxler » Tue Feb 21, 2017 9:48 am

I am confused by section record being used to put Cloquet above Rapids in 7AA this year. I seem to recall several years back where East was given the top seed even though their section record wasn't quite as strong as Rapids or Elk River (I forget which), but the argument that year East had the top state ranking of the three, so giving them the 1 seed appeared justifiable. Using that same logic this year would put Rapids at 3 (or even 2), but not 4.

karl(east)
Posts: 6462
Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2007 9:03 pm
Contact:

Post by karl(east) » Tue Feb 21, 2017 11:29 am

Traxler wrote:I am confused by section record being used to put Cloquet above Rapids in 7AA this year. I seem to recall several years back where East was given the top seed even though their section record wasn't quite as strong as Rapids or Elk River (I forget which), but the argument that year East had the top state ranking of the three, so giving them the 1 seed appeared justifiable. Using that same logic this year would put Rapids at 3 (or even 2), but not 4.
The year in question was 2014, when Elk River beat East in the regular season but East got the top seed. That said, they did both have 2 losses in the section, as East lost to ER and split with Cloquet, while ER lost to Rapids and split with Andover. ER's Andover loss was fairly late in the year, East destroyed GR in the regular season, and that ER win over East was in early December, with a top player out hurt for East. So you can at least see how the pieces were there to make an argument, even though I personally would've stuck with the head-to-head result and given the Elks the top seed.

It didn't amount to a whole lot that season, though, as those two were a step ahead of the rest of the section and made it through to the final without too much stress.

Yoopskater
Posts: 59
Joined: Sat Feb 18, 2017 11:10 am

Post by Yoopskater » Tue Feb 21, 2017 5:33 pm

It's just seeding. The best team should theoretically still come out of the district. I would never favor sacrificing good competitive regular season games just to get a better seeding method.

Section 8 guy
Posts: 540
Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2012 9:04 pm

Post by Section 8 guy » Thu Feb 23, 2017 12:59 am

goldy313 wrote:What is false?
Actually both things you list are wrong. Plus the 40 year timeframe you conveniently picked hides the reality of the situation.

Wouldn't people normally either use all time......or else use the 25 year two class era? I'd think so. Comparing all time would be pointless and we both know it would be Section 8 in a landslide.

During the 25 years of the two class era, Section 1 has won 10 winners bracket games.....total.......with 5 of those being in two recent seasons with Eignar's Army. That includes a 20 year run with 2 first round wins.

In that same timeframe Section 8 has played in almost that same number of title games (9) alone.......and has 27 wins overall.

I really don't care............cause it's a dumb discussion. And I'm not at all saying Section 8 is the cats meow. But I'd be pretty careful talking about the irrelevance of other sections when the one I'm crowing about went 2-18 in first round games during almost the entirety of the modern era.

Whataboutely
Posts: 8
Joined: Sun Jan 03, 2016 12:22 pm

Post by Whataboutely » Thu Feb 23, 2017 8:02 am

HappyHockeyFan wrote:Just get rid of conferences, keep the A and AA sections, each team plays each team in their section twice and then schedules whoever they want for the rest of their schedule. Too many games wasted on AA vs A anyway. Hill-Murray/St Thomas vs Simley/Sibley, what a waste for all teams involved. Plus top players would/could play more top competition every game during the season which would help development. Add to that 20 minute periods and were good!
I don't see the point in having a top ranked team play a bottom ranked team in the same section twice just to help with seeding's. The best team will still win the section regardless. Obviously Ely wants nothing to do with Hermantown or Hibbing because the talent and physical size level is so great. What folks seem to forget is that the better teams get to select from players to form the best team. Small schools sometimes have to play the younger smaller kids just to make a team. This leads to a greater potential of injury's for the smaller school and only helps the larger school run up their stats. If they end up playing each other in sections so be it but during the regular season forget it.

Post Reply