The season ended today, 2001 March 18

© 2000, 2001, Joe Schlobotnik (archives)

URL for this frameset: http://www.slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2001/pairwise.010318.shtml

Game results taken from US College Hockey Online's Division I composite schedule

With the conclusion of all the conference tournaments, the NCAA Men's Division I Ice Hockey regular season has come to an end, and it's time for the committee to seed the NCAA tournament. Five teams earned automatic berths today by winning their conference tournaments: St. Cloud in the WCHA, Michigan State in the CCHA, St. Lawrence in the ECAC, Boston College in Hockey East, and Mercyhurst in the MAAC. The seven at-large bids will be assigned on the basis of pairwise comparisons between teams using the NCAA's selection criteria. Here are the final pairwise comparisons among the 30 teams with Division 1 records of .500 or better:

Seven teams--North Dakota, Michigan, Colorado College, Minnesota, Maine, Wisconsin, and Providence--win their pairwise comparisons with all the rest of the teams in the running for an at-large berth, so they will clearly receive the seven at-large berths. The field of twelve is thus:

With the exception of Mercyhurst's win over Wisconsin, the PWCs can be used to define a strict ordering of the teams, where a "higher" team always wins the comparison with a "lower" one. But given the poor overall performance of the MAAC (average RPI of .457, compared to a range of .485 to .529 for the other four converences with auto-bids, and a non-conference record of 2-12-3 vs te ECAC and 0-12-1 vs the other three major conferences), and the well-known weaknesses of the NCAA selection criteria in the presence of weak conferences, it seems reasonable to expect that the NCAA will discount their comparisons as they did with Quinnipiac and Niagara in past years, and rank them #12 of the 12 tournament teams.

So, the four byes are given to the top four teams: MSU, BC, SCSU, and NoDak. To bracket the teams so that #1 MSU would meet #4 North Dakota in the finals, we give the seeds as follows:

1W

Mich State (C)

2W

St Cloud (W)

1E

Boston Coll (H)

2E

North Dakota (W)

Now we need to put some Eastern teams in the West Regional and some Western ones in the East. Given a 6/6 split, the committee always swaps two Eastern for two Western teams. In this case, we've got a 7/5 split, but an extra Western team has already been put in a bye slot in the East. I presume the committee will opt to swap two more pairs of teams anyway. All else being equal, it will be the bottom teams from each region, which would be Minnesota and Wisconsin for SLU and Mercyherst. But since the commitee likes to avoid second-round matchups of teams from the same conference, they might not want to keep all three Hockey East teams in the East regional, thus sending Providence West in place of SLU. The regional fields would then look like this:

The natural seedings in the West lead to no first or second-round intraconference matchups. In the East, the fact that natural 4-seed Maine comes from the same conference as 1-seed BC, and likewise with 2-seed NoDak and natural 3-seed Minnesota, the committee would trade the seeds of Maine and Minnesota. In order to avoid a first-round Wisconsin-Minnesota game (and incidentally preserve the natural pairings among the 3-6 teams), they would also drop Wisconsin to a 6 seed in place of SLU. So our best guess at the brackets is:

5W Providence (H)                  6E Wisconsin (W)     
4W CO College (W)                  3E Maine (H)         
     1W Mich State (C)   --+--2E North Dakota (W)       
                           |                            
     2W St Cloud (W)     --+--1E Boston Coll (H)        
3W Michigan (C)                    4E Minnesota (W)     
6W Mercyhurst (M)                  5E St Lawrence (E)   

In a little over twelve hours, we'll know what the committee actually did.