The Tigers are 0-6 against teams outside of their conference, there is NO WAY this team beats the mighty Denver Pioneers. You can mark that one down and come back to it later. An epic upset is not in the cards this season there is no Holy Cross in this years tourney.
I am sorry but that league does not deserve two bids because they put 12 teams in the AHA, if an AHA team wants to make the tourney they should have to earn their way to an at large bid based on their Pairwise Rankings and by beating teams from the big four leagues like NU did back in the early days of the CHA.
Star goalie Marc Cheverie, making a save against Michigan Tech this season, will lead DU into the East Regional on Friday. (Jack Dempsey, AP )The best scouting report on the University of Denver hockey team's first-round NCAA Tournament opponent is coming from Air Force coach Frank Serratore.I stand by my argument that the AHA is a brutal league that some of the bottom teams would lose to the power house teams of Division III. This year the AHA went an impressive 8-41-4 against the big four conferences. Thanks for playing. The funny thing that caught my attention this week on the INCH Podcast, was one of the participants (I think it was Gladdy) said that 'since there is only going to be 5 leagues in the NCAA next season the NCAA should give the regular season league champion of each league an auto bid, this includes the horrible AHA as well, because they were now going to be a 12 team league.
Serratore's Falcons played the Rochester Institute of Technology Tigers four times this season.
"They have good, competitive depth, and they're an older team," Serratore said of the Tigers, who went 2-2 against Air Force during Atlantic Hockey Association games. "They're plenty good enough to go up and down the ice with Denver, but I would be shocked if Denver doesn't penetrate and get more quality shots than teams from our league."
Top-seeded Denver (27-9-4) and fourth-seeded RIT (26-11-2) meet Friday in the East Regional opener at the Times Union Center in Albany, N.Y. The Tigers, who have won 10 consecutive games, are making their first NCAA Tournament appearance — just five years after becoming a Division I program.
RIT, seeded 15th overall, and 16th-seeded Alabama-Huntsville of College Hockey America are the only teams in the 16-team field that would not have qualified for the NCAA Tournament without an automatic bid as a conference tournament champion.
Air Force won the three previous AHA playoff championships and entered the NCAA Tournament as a No. 4 seed. The Falcons came close to upsetting Minnesota in 2008 and Miami (Ohio) in 2009 before beating Michigan 2-0 a year ago. Serratore, whose 2009 team came within an overtime goal of advancing to the Frozen Four, expects RIT to pose a similar threat, but he's picking the Pioneers because of goaltender Marc Cheverie. The junior starred in DU's 2-1 overtime win at Air Force last month.
"(RIT's) goalie, Jared DeMichiel, was our first-team all-conference goalie. But I don't know how much he was tested in our league, and they never won a nonconference game (0-6)," Serratore said. "If Denver takes them lightly, which I know they won't, RIT is more than capable of knocking them off. But if everything else is equal,
I'd take Cheverie over DeMichiel."
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I am sorry but that league does not deserve two bids because they put 12 teams in the AHA, if an AHA team wants to make the tourney they should have to earn their way to an at large bid based on their Pairwise Rankings and by beating teams from the big four leagues like NU did back in the early days of the CHA.
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