Sun Sports Gets Every Single Thing Wrong

Sometimes when you're reading the Sun sports section, you just have to stop and laugh. Today was one of those days.

First I was going to write about Matthew Manacher's column about Jim Calhoun, but then I came across Meredith Bennett-Smith's atrocious graphic on the hockey teams. Nearly everything is wrong. I would post a link, but it only ran in the print edition. So here we go.

Headline: Yale, Cornell Receive NCAA Berths
Wrong. See, there are two ways to make the NCAA tournament. The winner of each conference tournament receives an automatic bid, and the remainder of the 16 spots are filled with the teams sitting highest in the pairwise rankings. Neither Yale nor Cornell has a spot wrapped up, and by losing their home playoff series next weekend, both teams could easily play their way out of a trip to the NCAAs. I'm not sure what everyone at the Sun is smoking, but this is a completely incorrect conclusion, and a laughable headline. No team has received an NCAA berth, much less close-to-the-edge teams like Yale and Cornell.

Picture caption: Cornell's victory over Brown helped it secure a playoff berth.
What a moronic statement. Each of the 12 teams in the ECAC makes the conference tournament. This is as stupid as the banner flying at Quinnipiac's rink: "ECAC Tournament, 2007, 2008..."

Second sentence: "The Red will be joining the Bulldogs in the quest for an NCAA championship after securing the number two seed for the ECACS [sic]."
I didn't know the second-seeded team in the ECAC got an NCAA bid. Again, this is wrong.

Next sentence: "After the weekend, the Red will head into the post-season 13-6-3, compared to Yale's overall record of 15-5-2, the teams are three points apart."
Aside from being a run-on sentence, the facts here are also incorrect. These are conference records. Yale's overall record is 20-7-2, while Cornell's is 18-7-4.

Next sentence (more great writing): "In other news, Princeton and Harvard battled it out on Saturday for bragging rights mostly, with Harvard pulling out the 3-2 victory, but Princeton maintaining its third spot in the overall rankings, behind Cornell but ahead of St. Lawrence."
Actually, the loss dropped Princeton from 2nd to 3rd, so one could not say they "maintained" their third spot. They entered the weekend ahead of Cornell.

Thankfully, that's the end of the write-up. Let's head to the standings, copied in part below.

TEAM        POINTS    W  L  T
Dartmouth     24      11  9 3
Union         20       9 11 3
Clarkson      20       8 10 7
Colgate       17       6 11 7
Rennselaer    13       6 15 2
Brown         10       3 15 5

Try some of these out. 11 x 2 + 3 = 25. 9 x 2 + 3 = 21. 3 x 2 + 5 = 11. Etc.

This is what really stumps me: Where did Meredith get these records from? They're not conference records, but they're not overall records, either. She screwed them up just enough to make them wrong.

So here we are, in half a page of text and graphics, a slew of terrible errors. Disappointing.