Saturday Hockey Notes and Thoughts: Now, You See Why I Give Everyone A Shot

WORCESTER, Mass. -- I get crap every year, it seems, for not wanting to make any predictions on the NCAA Tournament.

Now you see why.

16 teams make this tournament. Any damn one of them could hoist the trophy in Tampa, and they all have a shot until someone eliminates them.

It sounds like cliche-ish coach speak, and it might be, but it's also absolutely, positively true. 100 percent true.

Proven again Friday, when two lower-seeded teams -- including one that blew a 3-0 lead and took a five-minute major penalty that spilled into overtime -- won games on a scintillating night of action to open the tournament.

Seeds don't matter. "Skill level" doesn't matter.

I went on a Twitter rant earlier this week, talking about how this is NOT the best way to decide the best team in college hockey. In reality, this isn't even a way to decide something like that.

That doesn't mean it's not a great tournament.

Reality is that tournaments don't decide the best team, because the best team rarely wins, especially when it's "win or go home." Other sports try, by conducting best-of-five or best-of-seven series, but even those samples are often too small to do anything but muddy the water.

Over the course of the college hockey regular season, there's no question -- no doubt whatsoever -- that Michigan was a better team than Cornell. More wins. Better power ratings. Better strength of schedule. Head to head, no one would have argued when comparing the two teams.

Of course, none of that matters now, because Cornell beat Michigan 3-2 in overtime in Green Bay Friday night. It's Cornell that moves on, and Michigan -- a team many expected to get back to Tampa and take another shot at its tenth national title -- is left to pick up the pieces.

You just want to give the big trophy to the best team over the course of an entire season? Talk to European soccer leagues. As an example, the Barclays Premier League -- regarded as the best of its kind in the world -- has 20 teams. Over the course of a 38-game campaign, each team plays everyone else in the league twice, once home and once away. Three points for a win, one for a draw, and at the end, the team with the most points is the champion.

It's fair. Complete round robin. No unbalanced schedule.

And if you want to just figure out the best team, it's about the only way.

Tournaments are about generating drama (well, revenue, too). They're about generating excitement. And they're about the fact that your particular group of teams is too big to have a fully balanced schedule, where you just give the title to the top record.

This is what's so wrong about college football, which tries to have it both ways. By not instituting a full-on playoff, one of the big talking points from the BCS hacks is that the regular season -- where the top teams rarely play head-to-head -- matters. But how can you say the regular season matters when the national championship game pitted two teams that had already played each other, and the team that lost the regular-season meeting at home ended up dominating in the "playoff" game?

In college hockey and other sports with a playoff system, the regular season matters. But for most of the 16 teams in the NCAA Tournament, the regular season was nothing but preparation for the NCAAs. You can try to get hot at the right time, and you can try to play your "best hockey" heading into the tournament, but games like Friday in Green Bay blow those theories out of the water.

Cornell was not hot, and Cornell was not playing its best entering the tournament. What mattered most was just getting into the tournament. Same for Ferris State, which beat Denver 2-1 in Green Bay Friday. The Bulldogs hadn't played for two weeks, because as the top seed in the CCHA tournament, they lost at home to Bowling Green in a best-of-three quarterfinal series. Denver, meanwhile, played very well at the WCHA Final Five last weekend, beating Michigan Tech and UMD in overtime (UMD in two overtimes, actually) before falling to North Dakota in the title game.

UMass-Lowell was similar, as the RiverHawks lost to Providence in three games in the Hockey East quarterfinals, took a weekend off, and ended up beating Miami in overtime in the East Regional Friday.

Every time you have a theory about how this all works, something happens to destroy it.

Makes me think more and more about what UMD coach Scott Sandelin said Friday. In talking about tournament experience, he mentioned that one of the things he's learned is to let his players enjoy these moments. It's hard to argue with that notion, because no matter how well you think you've prepared your team for it, there's just no guarantee that the moment will last.

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Just another NCAA Tournament lid-lifter, eh? In the East, we're guaranteed to have a team in the Frozen Four for the first time ever, as UMass-Lowell will play Union for a spot in Tampa. Union's 3-1 win over Michigan State was the school's first NCAA Tournament win ever. Those teams meet Saturday at 5:30pm.

The other regional final Saturday pits Cornell against Ferris State in the Midwest. The ECAC hasn't placed two teams in the Frozen Four since 1996. Cornell in 2003 was the last to make it. The CCHA, meanwhile, started with five teams and is down to two (Ferris State and Western Michigan).

The Northeast Regional and West Regional semifinals are Saturday, with title games set for Sunday.

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The usual keys apply for UMD and Maine on Saturday. The Bulldogs need to avoid the little mistakes that can turn into big problems. Against Denver, those mistakes ended up in the back of UMD's net. A bad dump-in turned into DU's first goal. A blue-line turnover led to a Jason Zucker breakaway goal. The inability to clear the puck from the defensive zone led to the double-overtime winner.

UMD played great outside of those mistakes, and it needs to continue that thread against Maine. Get pucks to the net. Get bodies to the net. Pressure the Black Bears defense and get in goalie Dan Sullivan's kitchen.

At the other end, protect the goalie. Play a simple game with chips out of the zone if there is nothing else available. Don't get bottled up because of silly turnovers or poor puck support.

Even doing all the right things guarantees you nothing, but at least there are no regrets for UMD if it plays its best game and is still beaten.

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Our coverage from DCU Center in Worcester starts at 6pm, with faceoff at 6:30pm. IF Boston College and Air Force play overtime in the opening game, it's unlikely that the UMD game will start on time. There must be 50 minutes between games, so as long as that first game ends by 5:40, UMD will start as scheduled.

You can hear the game on 94X -- 94.1 FM in town, and 104.3 FM everywhere else -- and along the Bulldog Sports Radio Network, which includes KQ 105.5 (Grand Rapids area) and KQ 106.7 (Babbitt/Ely). On the internet, we have two streams of the game. One at www.94xrocks.com. The other stream can be accessed here. If you can get that stream from wherever you are, we ask that you do so. The 94xrocks.com stream is capped at 200 listeners, so the more people that listen to the other stream -- which has an unlimited audience -- the better. That will allow people who are on the go to use the Red Rock Radio app to listen to the game.

Dan Boyle: Stand Up Guy

By now, you've probably seen the incredible gaffe by San Jose defenseman Dan Boyle in Sunday's overtime loss to Colorado.

Boyle's own-goal (though it appears to have hit the stick of Colorado's Ryan O'Reilly after Boyle tried to whack the puck around the wall) gave Colorado an improbable 1-0 win, despite San Jose outshooting the hosts 51-17 (43-8 after the first period).

In a situation where most of the world's population would find a cozy rock to hide under for about a week, Boyle sat at his locker and faced the media like a man after the game.

The goal, with a brief replay, starts out this video, with audio from CBC's Mark Lee, who was as incredulous as the rest of us were. Then it cuts to Boyle's postgame comments.



I already felt sorry for Boyle. The fact that he sat there and took the bullet like he did afterward only makes me respect him more.

Boyle is a leader on this team, so his ability to bounce back will be important. He should also be able to expect some support from his teammates, especially captain Rob Blake, who surely has seen some goofy-ass bounces in his day. In fact, a puck off Blake's skate in the final minute Wednesday night gave Colorado a 2-1 win in the series opener.

That means San Jose has lost two games -- basically -- on own goals. It has to be demoralizing, but this is not the same Sharks team we saw last year against Anaheim. They've outshot Colorado 129-69 in the series, scored six goals in Friday's Game 2, and are clearly a superior group, as opposed to the team that was horribly outplayed by Anaheim in the first round a year ago.

Now, their resiliency will be tested like never before.

'Who Dat?' Done It

As odd as it is to write, the New Orleans Saints are Super Bowl champions.

Good for them, I say.

It wasn't a fluke, either. The Saints fell behind 10-0, but it was almost like a rope-a-dope maneuver. From that point, New Orleans owned the show, outscoring Indianapolis 31-7 and clearly establishing themselves as the better-prepared team, along with being the better team.

There are many ways to emerge victorious in a one-game playoff. It's part of why playoffs are a bit of a misnomer when it comes to determining the best team in a given sport. However, there is no questioning a team that dominated virtually from start to finish, and then beat three future Hall of Fame quarterbacks in very different ways to win a championship.

(Think about it. The Saints jumped all over Kurt Warner and the Cardinals, running up points like crazy and then coasting through most of the second half. They practically broke Brett Favre in half in the NFC title game. While they didn't hit Peyton Manning much, they rattled the hell out of him mentally and confused him like he hasn't been confused in a long time.

Yes, I know I picked Indianapolis. If I had it to do over again, I'd pick the Colts, too. Not to pat myself on the back, but at least I got part of the equation right.

Turnovers. Special teams. Fundamentals. These things don't always decide games. But they're usually a good starting point. And they're terribly hard to predict. ... it's so hard to say that one team or the other will win the battle of "little things" in a game like this.

The Saints won the battle.

I had a feeling before the game that something like this would happen. Sean Payton made clear his message to his team throughout the week, and he made clear during meetings with the CBS broadcasters that he would not let his team get caught playing passive, not-to-lose football.

They were going to be the aggressors, and in doing so, the Saints made up a new blueprint for success in the NFL.

New Orleans treated this like a hockey game, really. They wanted to initiate from the start, but they also knew they weren't going to bash Manning around like they did to Favre. Instead of initiating a physical assault on Manning, they initiated a mental one. Read Dan Graziano, FanHouse colleague, on the Saints' plan.

You have to go back to Monday, Jan. 25, the day after the Saints beat the Vikings to claim the NFC title. In a meeting with his coaches, Saints head coach Sean Payton was discussing the idea that they would do well to encourage the Colts to run.

"You guys can't be upset," Payton said to defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, "if they have 100 yards rushing."

Williams, who agreed with the sentiment, went a little harder.

"We can't be upset if they have 200 yards rushing," Williams said.

So a couple of days later, Payton addressed the defense in a team meeting and hedged.

"You guys can't be upset if they get 150 yards rushing," he said.

So a multi-faceted game plan developed, and one of its key facets was a shift to a 3-4 alignment for the first quarter so the Saints could cover the Colts' receivers deep and invite them to run the ball up the middle.

"We tried to invite them to run as much as they would do it," Williams said late Sunday night, when it was all over.

The Colts did. They racked up 66 rushing yards in the first quarter and raced out to a 10-0 lead that might have had Saints fans panicked but was pretty much along the lines of what Williams had been expecting. As long as the score didn't get out of hand, he knew he could stick with the amoeba game plan, which called for a switch back to a 4-3 alignment for the second quarter and then a ton of shifting looks in the second half.

"You can't beat Peyton Manning if you don't keep changing what he's looking at," Williams said.

That last quote is the money shot from this game. You can read 3,000 more words on the Super Bowl, and none of them will be as significant as those 14.

Finally, someone had the guts to change defensive looks, possibly allowing themselves to be singed for a time, because they knew they couldn't afford to get into a pattern.

I'm not about to say that this is the downfall of the Colts or of Manning. He's an elite quarterback, and he will be enshrined in Canton someday. He will have more chances to win rings, and he will likely hoist the Lombardi Trophy again.

But he met his match -- for at least one night -- in Williams. He met his match with an opponent who refused to sit back and play passively, allowing Manning to dictate matchups and tempo for four quarters. He met his match with an opponent who refused to allow Manning to adjust, because Williams was prepared to be the initiator in the mental game during the second half.

Payton, however, gets the award for aggression. It's one thing to see a hole in a team's kick return game that can be attacked by an onside kick. It's another to 1) have enough faith in your kicker (who had never tried an onside kick), 2) have enough faith in a defense that was beaten regularly in the first half to make a stop if necessary, and 3) have the guts to make the brashest Super Bowl play call in years.

The guts of Payton, the confidence and swagger of Williams, and the talent of guys like Brees, Tracy Porter, and -- yes -- Thomas Morstead made this team unbeatable on this night.

Even for a guy like Manning, who is used to having nights like this go his way. This time, Manning found an opponent who refused to let him win, no matter what he could have tried.

Let's see how many teams follow the blueprint, because it's not a popular path to choose.

NFL teams aren't known for ruthless aggression from a standpoint of strategery. They prefer to do what everyone else does, and play this bland, conservative style of football, hoping the other teams screws up.

Since guys like Manning rarely screw up, teams who play the Colts conservatively are ripe for the picking. But the Saints clearly saw things on film in the AFC title game, when the Jets bottled the Colts up until the two-minute warning of the first half.

Where the Jets went wrong, though, is that they had no answer once Manning figured them out. They didn't have anything to throw at him, because he had seen it all and had a way to beat it.

Williams, as noted by Graziano, knew going in that they had to be constantly changing looks, the way the Saints do on offense.

By turning his defense into an offense, Williams held the key to a Super Bowl win for a franchise -- and a city -- that will revere it like no other.

Stunner: Champ Isn't Always 'Best Team'

As you may have heard, Sunday is the Super Bowl.

(You'll notice that I have avoided saying much since the Packers were eliminated. I also didn't say a word about the Vikings being eliminated. It's partially by design. I figure that I'm not in Miami, and you're getting plenty of Super Bowl coverage elsewhere. I'll break down the matchup and throw out a prediction while I'm in Houghton this weekend.)

As the Colts and Saints prepare to lock horns, fans are left to marvel at the sight of No. 1 seeds advancing out of the respective conferences. It doesn't happen often.

Parity in sports is a hot-button subject. In the NFL, the objective these days is more to just get in the playoffs than it is to have a 14-2 season. Other sports, while still leaning toward the favorites, have had their moments.

Of course, it helps that other pro sports feature best-of-seven series in the playoffs. The format tends to tilt in favor of the superior team, since it's pretty hard to be an inferior team and win four of seven games.

If you do, it's probably because you deserve it, no matter your status in the regular season. After all, you just won four out of seven (or fewer) games against a good team. It's not a one-and-done fluke. It's more of the real deal.

For the NFL, a study confirms what most of us have known for many, many years.

The best team doesn't always win.

To quantify this, consider an alternate universe in which the NBA adopted the NFL’s format for the regular season and playoffs. Neil Paine of Basketball Reference constructed an approximation of such an NBA season, aligning teams to match as closely as possible the NBA’s 30-team league with the NFL’s 32-team league. With 16 games to go around, there aren’t enough games for every team to play every other one, like in the NFL — so, for instance, the Lakers don’t play the Cleveland Cavaliers in this alternate reality. Then Paine simulated 10,000 such NBA seasons, using teams’ stats through last Tuesday’s games to estimate their strength and therefore their likelihood of winning each game.

In these seasons, the usual suspects tend to finish on top. The Cavs win the “Super Bowl” 19.6% of the time, followed by the Lakers at 19.4% and the Celtics at 12.1%. The Hawks, Nuggets, Spurs, Jazz and Magic all also have at least a 6% chance of winning it all. However, some losing teams win in more than one of these simulated seasons, including the 76ers, the Clippers and the Kings.

Before this NBA season, Paine ran similar simulations, using the actual NBA season structure, and found that the best team has about a 48% chance of winning the title.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again.

Playoffs aren't designed to figure out which team is the best. They're designed for drama, television ratings, and revenue.

The only way for the best team to win the championship every year is to adopt the "everyone plays each other twice" system used by -- among others -- the English Premier League.

It will never happen. Instead, fans in the States have always enjoyed playoff competition, and they're not at all concerned about proving who the absolute best team is. That's why college football gets so much crap from American sports fans, after all.