If the season ended today, 2001 March 12

© 2000, 2001, Joe Schlobotnik (archives)

URL for this frameset: http://slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2001/pairwise.010312.shtml

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

This analysis is based on the pairwise comparisons at the time it was written. You can also go through this process interactively with the up-to-date results using the "You Are The Committee" script, or you can fill in hypothetical results for the remaining games using the conference tournament bracket or non-table hypothetical interface, and use the resulting pairwise comparisons. You can also use the self-service hypothetical interface to add, remove, or change any results you like from this season and go from there.

One conference, College Hockey America has held its conference tournament, while the other five Division I conferences have completed the first round of their postseasons. This season no automatic bids are being awarded for regular season championships; five autobids will be awarded to the winners of the five remaining conference tournaments, and the remaining seven NCAA tournament berths will be assigned a based on pairwise comparisons between teams using the NCAA's selection criteria. Here are the current pairwise comparisons among the 29 teams with Division 1 records of .500 or better:

Note that no member of the MAAC is in the top 12 according to comparisons, and with Clarkson's early exit from the ECAC playoffs, neither is any team still alive in the ECAC postseason. So at least two automatic bids will go to teams which would not otherwise receive at-large bids. For the exercise of a mock seeding based on the current results, let's assign each conference's auto-bid to the highest seed left in their conference tournament, namely Michigan State, North Dakota, St. Lawrence, Boston College and Mercyhurst. Five of the seven at-large bids are no-brainers, as St. Cloud, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado College and Maine win pairwise comparisons with all of the other 20 teams eligible for an at-large berth. Wisconsin wins all but the unreliable Canisius comparison, and Providence beats everyone but Dartmouth, so those two teams are logical choices for the last two. (In particular, Providence wins comparisons with UNH and any other team which could be reasonably considered to be "on the bubble". So the field of twelve would thus be:

Another change from past years is that the byes are given out strictly according to the pairwise comparisons, and the top four teams (MSU, BC, NoDak, and SCSU, include three Western and one Eastern team. MSU, as the top team, earns the #1 seed in the West, with BC getting the #1 East seed. Presumably the third-best team, North Dakota, gets to stay in the West as a 2-seed, and St. Cloud becomes the #2-East seed.

Next, we need to swap the bottom teams out of each region. There are four non-bye teams left in each region, and presumably we still want to swap two pairs of teams. In the West, the bottom two are CC and Wisconsin. In the East, they're SLU and Mercyhurst, but since the NCAA likes to avoid possible intraconference games in the regionals, I'd guess they'd send one of the three Hockey East teams (Providence being the obvious choice on the basis of comparisons). That would seem to call for Providence and SLU to be traded for CC and Wisconsin, but the committee has shown its willingness in the past to overrule comparisons won by teams from non-competitive conferences, and Mercyhurst would certainly fall into that category. That then leads to SLU staying East while Mercyhurst and Providence are sent West:

Now the teams are seeded. Each region should be seeded so that #4 plays #5 in the first round, with the winner going on to play #1, while #3 and #6 play for the right to face #2. All else being equal, this would be done on the basis of the pairwise comparisons, but a glance at the tables above show that in both regionals, the #1 and #4 teams are from the same conference, as are #2 and #3. So the committee would switch the #3 and #4 teams in each regional. In order to maintain the first-round pairings, they'd also switch #5 and #6, with the results being the following brackets:

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

The Gory Details

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.