The NCAA updates their rulebook every two years, and this summer was an off-year, so there will be no new rules in college hockey next season, but the Rules Committee did attempt to clarify a few rules, specifically in regards to controversial contact-to-the-head plays, as well as point out some areas of the rulebook that should be given special attention next year.There’s really no changes to the contact to the head rule. You still can’t do it. That’s about it. It’s reminiscent of the time the WCHA asked the Rules Committee to explain, preferably in very small words, I would assume, what exactly “zero tolerance” meant.
Meanwhile, the committee will also recommend putting a greater emphasis on diving and embellishment penalties, something which is greatly needed, especially in the WCHA. It would be nice to see diving called as a stand-alone infraction more often, since the odd chance that a dive will draw coincidental minors isn’t much of a disincentive.
Finally, the committee listed a few ideas that could come up next time the rule book is open to changes. H
I was getting ready to write my annual post on why the math system the NCAA uses to calculate who gets in to the NCAA tournament, the Pairwise Ranking, makes no sense, when yesterday, College Hockey News announced the NCAA decided to make the system ever worse, by reverting back to an old definition of what a “Team Under Consideration” is. Rather than only comparing the top 25 teams in the RPI, every team with an RPI of .5000 or better will be under consideration.
So why is this change like a worse version of Hitler(no offense, North Dakota fans)? The big reason is that it pushes the number of “Teams Under Consideration” from 25 up to 34. We’ll start with the obvious fact that there’s no reason 58% of the teams in college hockey need to be “under consideration” for the NCAA tournament. That’s more than twice the number of teams that actually get into the tournament.
So if the CHL is really serious about forming some kind of partnership with the NCAA(stick with me here), and because I’m still amazed at the amount of confusion that I see over this, I decided it would be wise to trudge my way through the NCAA’s Division I manual, specifically through Bylaw 12, which deals with amateurism to see just how much distance there is.
In an unnecessarily long 444-page tome filled with all sorts of confusing lawyer language(“final non-certified certification”) the NCAA is remarkably clear on the CHL, giving it it’s own sub-sub-sub-sub-section: