Since today is one of the dates when, according to the NCAA's Men's Division I Championship Handbook, the Division I advisory committees hold telecons, let's take our first look at how the NCAA selection procedure might play out if the season ended today.
Much of the seeding is based on pairwise comparisons carried out according to the selection criteria. Here are how those comparisons look for the 29 tournament-eligible teams with records at or above .500:
The tournament champions from five conferences receive automatic bids. Of the current league leaders (according to winning percentage), Denver (WCHA), Michigan State (CCHA) and UMass-Lowell (Hockey East) are all currently in the top six according to the pairwise, while Clarkson (ECAC) and Mercyhurst (MAAC) are not. If we pretend that these five teams win the five auto-bids, the remaining seven at-large bids go to the other seven members of the top ten in the table above; the tournament field would thus be:
| Team | lPWR | RPI | Comparisons Won | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Denver U (W) | 11 | .6566 | ML | SC | NH | MS | Mn | BU | Mi | CC | Me | Ck | Mh |
| Mass-Lowell (H) | 10 | .6431 | SC | NH | MS | Mn | BU | Mi | CC | Me | Ck | Mh | |
| St Cloud (W) | 9 | .6357 | NH | MS | Mn | BU | Mi | CC | Me | Ck | Mh | ||
| New Hampshire (H) | 8 | .6180 | MS | Mn | BU | Mi | CC | Me | Ck | Mh | |||
| Mich State (C) | 7 | .5983 | Mn | BU | Mi | CC | Me | Ck | Mh | ||||
| Minnesota (W) | 6 | .6140 | BU | Mi | CC | Me | Ck | Mh | |||||
| Boston Univ (H) | 5 | .5874 | Mi | CC | Me | Ck | Mh | ||||||
| Michigan (C) | 4 | .5795 | CC | Me | Ck | Mh | |||||||
| CO College (W) | 3 | .5756 | Me | Ck | Mh | ||||||||
| Maine (H) | 2 | .5666 | Ck | Mh | |||||||||
| Clarkson (E) | 1 | .5360 | Mh | ||||||||||
| Mercyhurst (M) | 0 | .4995 | |||||||||||
Note that each team wins all the comparisons with the teams below them, so there is a well defined ranking, 1-12, of the teams.
The top four teams get byes. #1 Denver and #4 UNH need to be seeded so that they would meet in the national semifinal, which is easily accomplished by giving #1 Denver and #3 SCSU the two top seeds in the Western regional and #2 UML and #4 New Hampshire the 1 and 2 seeds in the East.
The remaining eight teams are four from the East and four from the West, so we should swap two Eastern for two Western teams to mix up the regionals. Regional hosts BU and Michigan have to stay in their regions. Of the remaining three Eastern teams, Maine has the advantage in the selection criteria, but with three Hockey East teams already in the Eastern regional, one would have to guess they'd go West. In the West, Michigan State beats the two WCHA teams on the criteria, plus they'd be the biggest draw in Michigan, and produce a regional with two teams from each Western conference. So the likely swaps seem to be Maine and Mercyhurst for Minnesota and Colorado College.
Western Regional | Eastern Regional | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Finally, we need to seed each regional. Going by the pairwise comparisons give tournament brackets of
5W Maine (H) 6E Clarkson (E)
4W Michigan (C) 3E Minnesota (W)
1W Denver U (W) --+--2E New Hampshire (H)
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2W St Cloud (W) --+--1E Mass-Lowell (H)
3W Mich State (C) 4E Boston Univ (H)
6W Mercyhurst (M) 5E CO College (W)
There's not really any more fine-tuning to be done, since the first- and second-round games are contain only one possible intraconference matchup (BU-Lowell), which is inevitable given that the two bye teams plus the host team are all from Hockey East. The one question with the current numbers would seem to be whether to send #11 Clarkson (overall #18) West in place of #10 Maine; the rest of the seeds would remain the same in this case.
If you want to have a look at why each pairwise comparison turned out the way it did, you can click on the individual comparisons in the table at the top of this article for a breakdown of criteria.