The Beanpot is behind us, the conferences are beginning their home stretch, and according to the NCAA's Men's Division I Championship Handbook, the Division I advisory committee had a teleconference today, so it's time for another dry run of the NCAA selection procedure.
A big part of the procedure are pairwise comparisons carried out according to the selection criteria. Here's a rundown of the pairwise comparisons among the 28 tournament-eligible teams with records at or above .500:
The first five bids go to the winners of the conference tournaments in five conferences. For this dry run, we give those to the leaders in those conferences, which are Denver (WCHA), Michigan or Michigan State (CCHA), New Hampshire (Hockey East), Cornell (ECAC), and Mercyhurst (MAAC). All of these teams except Mercyhurst are in the top ten in the pairwise rankings, and those ten teams win all their comparisons with all the other teams under consideration. (The other five of those ten are SCSU, Minnesota, BU, CC, and Maine.) The final at-large bid would seem to come down to a choice among Mass-Lowell, Alaska-Fairbanks, and Western Michigan. Each team wins one and loses one pairwise comparison with the other two, but UML has the best RPI of the group, so they would get the bid. This makes the hypothetical field of twelve:
| Team | lPWR | RPI | Comparisons Won | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Denver U (W) | 11 | .6288 | SC | NH | Mn | BU | CC | MS | Cr | Mi | Me | ML | Mh |
| St Cloud (W) | 10 | .6164 | NH | Mn | BU | CC | MS | Cr | Mi | Me | ML | Mh | |
| New Hampshire (H) | 9 | .6158 | Mn | BU | CC | MS | Cr | Mi | Me | ML | Mh | ||
| Minnesota (W) | 8 | .6141 | BU | CC | MS | Cr | Mi | Me | ML | Mh | |||
| Boston Univ (H) | 6 | .6043 | CC | MS | Cr | Me | ML | Mh | |||||
| CO College (W) | 6 | .5959 | MS | Cr | Mi | Me | ML | Mh | |||||
| Mich State (C) | 5 | .5931 | Cr | Mi | Me | ML | Mh | ||||||
| Cornell (E) | 4 | .5810 | Mi | Me | ML | Mh | |||||||
| Michigan (C) | 4 | .5804 | BU | Me | ML | Mh | |||||||
| Maine (H) | 2 | .5778 | ML | Mh | |||||||||
| Mass-Lowell (H) | 1 | .5701 | Mh | ||||||||||
| Mercyhurst (M) | 0 | .5378 | |||||||||||
The first-round byes are given to the top four, and we should bracket things so that #4 Minnesota would play #1 Denver in the semifinals. This can be accomplished by seeding DU and SCSU first and second, respectively, in the West, and UNH and Minnesota first and second, respectively, in the East.
Now, for assigning teams to the regionals, things get a little tricky. The regionals are in Worcester, MA and Ann Arbor, MI, so the host teams BU and Michigan have to stay in their respective regions. There are six Eastern and six Western teams in the tournament, but we already have a Western team (Minnesota) playing in the East. In the past, the NCAA tried to send two Eastern teams West and two Western teams East to mix things up, but this year they may want to reduce air travel by keeping teams closer to home. Still, at least one Eastern team needs to go West. The obvious choice would be Mercyhurst, since they lose comparisons with all of the other tournament teams, plus Ann Arbor is actually a shorter trip for them than Worcester, anyway. Problem is, that would leave three Hockey East teams to play in the two first round games of the East regional, which would necessitate a first-round intraconference matchup, which the NCAA still wants to avoid. So they would have to send Lowell (or possibly Maine) to the West either instead of or in addition to Mercyhurst. Given that Colorado College would have to fly to either regional, a logical solution to the whole thing would be to send CC to the East and Mercyhurst and UML to the West, producing the following regionals:
Western Regional | Eastern Regional | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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We can't quite seed the regionals directly by pairwise comparisons, since that would give a first-round BU-Maine game, so we switch Cornell and Maine to get the following:
5W Mass-Lowell (H) 6E Cornell (E)
4W Michigan (C) 3E Boston Univ (H)
1W Denver U (W) --+--2E Minnesota (W)
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2W St Cloud (W) --+--1E New Hampshire (H)
3W Mich State (C) 4E CO College (W)
6W Mercyhurst (M) 5E Maine (H)
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.