Breaking Down the NCAA Tournament

There was little suspense when USCHO.com released its latest poll ranking the top 15 teams in Division I hockey on Monday evening, but within that poll there were a few items that made the differences between human subjectivity (the polls) and the by-the-numbers analysis (what USCHO.com calls PairWise rankings) that the NCAA Selection Committee uses to determine the placement and the seedings within regionals.

This type of controversy is nothing new to the major college sports (and here I might be stretching hockey’s popularity a bit): think about the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) and the ruckus that erupted with USC being named National Champs by national sportswriters and LSU, the winner of Nokia Sugar Bowl, being named National Champs—through a contractual requirement with the BCS—by the coaches. The 16 teams that play in the Frozen Four tournament are selected strictly by the numbers, and since polls are not given any weight whatsoever, there is only a small degree of controversy.

The committee selects teams with a Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) above .500, and then uses four criteria to list the teams in comparison to one another. The four criteria are a team’s record against common opponents, its head-to-head competition, its performance against teams with RPIs at or above .500 (i.e. teams under consideration) and the team’s RPI itself (a combination of a team’s winning percentage and the winning percentage of the teams it faces). Bonus points are awarded for “good wins” with the exact amount of the bonus (which is a closely kept secret each year) varying according to whether the win occurred at home, on a neutral site, or on the road.

An additional caveat, and this is the condition under which Harvard gained entrance to the Tournament both this year and in 2002, is that the winners of the six college hockey conferences—Atlantic Hockey, the CHA, the CCHA, the ECAC, Hockey East and the WCHA—are given automatic-bids into the NCAA. This year the auto-bid aided Harvard (ECAC), Niagara (CHA) and Holy Cross (Atlantic Hockey). All three teams would not have qualified for the tournament based on their Pairwise rankings.

That is the way teams are selected and seeded for the tournament. Into what regional site the teams are placed is subject to a number of other criteria, including the need to avoid conference matchups in the first round, the requirement that any regional host school will be placed at their site, a desire to match the seeds against their opposites (i.e. the overall No. 1 should ideally play the overall No. 16), a requirement to have teams travel as little distance as possible if circumstances allow, and a hope to maximize attendance across all four regional sites.

Based on these criteria, Harvard was sent off to the East Regional in Albany, N.Y. where it will face Maine on Friday at 5 p.m. Given USCHO.com’s PairWise Rankings, Maine was the overall No. 3 and Harvard was No. 14, so the seeding criteria works out. And the teams are from different conferences—Harvard and Maine are the ECAC and Hockey East champions respectively. All the matchups, across all the regions, add up by the numbers.

Except one, in my opinion. I have a bone to pick with the NCAA for abandoning a criteria it used to measure a team’s recent success. It could be a team’s last five games, it’s last 10, or the last 16 games, but there definitely should be a weight given to teams that are surging into the NCAA Tournament and those that are backing in. Harvard is one of the teams that is surging. So is Maine. In fact, they are the two hottest teams in the nation; both are riding seven game-winning streak into Albany.

One of the teams that is backing into the NCAAs is Boston College. Despite its No. 1 seeding in Manchester, N.H. and its overall No. 2 rank, the Eagles have lost five of their last six games and were bounced in the first round of the Hockey East Tournament by Boston University—a squad that struggled all year. And as a reward for its recent struggles, BC draws Niagara, the CHA champion. With all due respect to Niagara, it comes from a bottom-tier conference. College hockey is divided up into the sure-things (the CCHA, Hockey East and the WCHA), the maybes (ECAC) and the also-rans (Atlantic Hockey and CHA).

So, the coldest team in the country draws an easy first round win while Maine and Harvard beat each other up. Hardly sounds fair, right? Turns out most college hockey followers agree. The latest USCHO.com poll released on Monday had the Black Bears of Maine ranked as the No. 1 team in the nation on the strength of their triple-overtime 2-1 win over UMass. North Dakota fell slightly after a 5-4 loss in the WCHA Championship to current-No. 3 Minnesota. And Boston College clocked in at No. 4.

Instead of an easy draw that pits the Eagles against the Purple Eagles (Niagara), Boston College should be punished with a first round date against Notre Dame, a team that beat BC on its own ice this season, or perhaps even Harvard. Instead of a tight contest pitting the two hottest teams in the nation, Maine should be skating against a Holy Cross or a Niagara, not the Crimson. The polls, and by extension the people, say so. Here’s hoping the NCAA will learn to listen to that human element.

—Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald can be reached at tmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu.