UAH is now just past the halfway point in the season, as we’ve played 20 games with 18 left. It’s now instructional to spend a little time with KRACH to see how we measure up. KRACH is a logistic regression method for looking at college hockey results. If a team’s KRACH is twice as large as its opponents, you’d expect the team to win two games in three. If the result were different, the regression would change. It’s all very nerdy stuff, but we’re UAH people, so we’re equipped to noodling through it. Google KRACH and you can get some pretty detailed information about it.
But let’s go look at the NCAA Division I Men’s KRACH on USCHO.com:
UAH isn’t in last! That “honor” goes to the US Military Academy, who’ve won three games on the easiest Division I schedule to date; UAH’s one win comes on an 11th-best slate. We have the second-toughest schedule in the league; unfortunately, we trail Bemidji in that one by 1.
Better, here’s who’s in a good place in the poll: our opponents! WCHA members are in bold, teams we still have games with are in italics.
3 Ferris State, 4 St. Cloud State, 12 Wisconsin, 15 Notre Dame, 16 Minnesota State 19 Lake Superior State 21 Northeastern 27 Bowling Green 32 Western Michigan 33 Alaska 34 Alaska-Anchorage 35 Bemidji State 38 Michigan Tech 40 Northern Michigan
We’re the only WCHA team in the bottom-quarter of the KRACH rankings, which is a good thing for the league. Also, the back half of our schedule consists of just one top-15 team (Notre Dame, who we’ll play the weekend after this), a Mankato trip that comes at the end of a Fairbanks-Houghton-Mankato swing, and the rest of our games against teams in the bottom half of the nation. That won’t be easy, especially not that swing, but when it comes to the way that the rankings look right now, we’ve weathered the worst of the storm.
I don’t know, I guess I was just happy that UAH was 58th in KRACH.