"In round two, Carleton beat Chicago head-to-head, so the Minnesota school entered the final playoffs with a one-game advantage." My Carleton team had a very good time at the Princeton tournament, to which I did not accompany them. I want to register my puzzlement, however, at the above finals format. Why in the world, if you have two teams tied for first place with the same 15-1 record, would one team be given a one-game advantage in the finals?! That was frankly bizarre, and not fair to Chicago. By all means, if one team had been 16-0 and another 15-1, and you want to have a finals matchup rather than declare a champion right then, give the team with the better record a game advantage in the finals. But when the teams have the same record, the tiebreaker ~is~ the final -- a single game, or best two of three, or whatever, but with the teams on the equal footing that their records have earned. Head to head results have their place as an inferior sort tiebreaker where ties can't actually be played-off due to time or lack of packets or whatever, but playing them off is always the superior solution when possible. But why in the world would a tournament that IS going to be able to play off the tie first use head to head to create an artificial non-tie? With both teams at 15-1, the fact that Chicago's loss had come to Carleton, while Carleton's had come to Florida Atlantic, should have been a triviality with no bearing on the fact that the teams had finished ~tied~. Pretending that Carleton's 15-1 somehow merited a higher ranking than Chicago's identical record was, I have to say, both strange and unfair. (Though kudos to Chicago for rising to the occasion by beating Carleton twice anyway.) Eric Hillemann Carleton Coach
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