Has our NCAA bubble burst?

Frozen Four Bubble
With the loss to Wisconsin on Saturday, Penn State has dropped from 14th in the Pairwise rankings, and likely in the NCAA tournament, all the way to 18th and definitely on the outside of the tournament looking in.

The question at hand is how disastrous was our loss and can we get back up to 14th where we stand a decent chance of getting a bid? Despite what you might read elsewhere, all hope is not lost. We can still pull it off. In fact, we could quite possibly get right back there after Friday night’s games. Here’s how.

First of all, here’s the current Pairwise Standings.

  1. North Dakota
  2. Quinnipiac
  3. St. Cloud State
  4. Providence
  5. Boston College
  6. Denver
  7. Yale
  8. Michigan
  9. Boston University
  10. Notre Dame
  11. Harvard
  12. Mass.-Lowell
  13. Minnesota-Duluth
  14. Michigan Tech
  15. Nebraska-Omaha
  16. Cornell
  17. Minnesota
  18. Penn State

Sixteen teams get NCAA bids. The 15th and 16th seeded spots are almost assuredly going to be autobids given to the champions of the Atlantic Hockey and WCHA tournaments. So the magic spot for getting an NCAA bid is #14. That’s where PSU sat last week but now appears to be far in the distance.

But not so fast. Let’s do some analysis to see what’s necessary for Penn State to climb back there.

First of all, we’ll start off by assuming Penn State wins on Friday.

Now what are the rest of our assumptions? The Big Ten is the only conference still in regular season play. The other five conferences have all entered tournament play. This weekend’s games are all best of three series being held on the home ice of the higher seed. For purposes of our analysis, I’m going to assume that the home team wins those Friday night games, a not at all unreasonable assumption since that home team will likely be favored in every one of the games.

That leaves two other games to consider, Wisconsin at Minnesota, and Ohio State at Michigan State. Let’s assume the home team wins both of those (Minnesota will certainly be favored, the OSU/MSU game might be a toss up, but it also probably doesn’t matter much).

Basically, there are six teams that are fighting for the 13th and 14th slots (at least, as of the moment, the other 12 are pretty close to locks). They are Duluth, Michigan Tech, Omaha, Cornell, Minnesota, and Penn State.

What happens if I run the analysis with my above assumptions where all the home teams, other than Michigan, win their games on Friday? Here’s how those six would then stack up:

  1. Minnesota-Duluth
  2. Michigan Tech
  3. Penn State
  4. Nebraska-Omaha
  5. Minnesota
  6. Cornell

We pass both Cornell and Nebraska-Omaha because they will have lost (to #2 Quinnipiac and #6 Denver respectively). We pass Minnesota because, although they will have a win, our win over Michigan will be worth substantially more than Minnesota’s win over Wisconsin (we’ll jump Minnesota in the RPI, plus we’ll pick up quality win bonus points).

So that scenario takes us all the way to #15, trailing only Michigan Tech and Duluth. We only need to pass one more team to be back inside the bubble. Or do we? Michigan Tech is a WCHA team. That conference is very likely to be a one bid conference only. It’s very likely that the only way that Michigan Tech could hold onto that #14 (or better) spot would be to win their conference. But if they do that, then they would no longer be bumping a team out of the Top 16 bubble. Barring any major upsets in the conference tournaments, the last NCAA bid would go to the 15th team in the pairwise, and, at least for the moment, that would be Penn State.

Even so, it wouldn’t hurt for us to build up a little cushion. For that reason, I would also encourage fans to root for Miami to top Duluth. They are two very evenly matched teams, finishing 4th and 5th in the NCHC with almost identical overall records (Duluth 15-14-5, Miami 15-16-3), so a Miami win is by no means out of the realm of possibilities. If Miami were to pull of the win, then the Pairwise would be:

  1. Michigan Tech
  2. Penn State
  3. Minnesota-Duluth
  4. Nebraska-Omaha
  5. Minnesota
  6. Cornell

Things would be looking very nice at that point because the Michigan Tech/NCHC conference one bid scenario would still be in play. We’d actually have one spot in hand at that point.

So the long and the short of it is, beat Michigan on Friday and we are still very much in the NCAA hunt for that last bid or two.

Of course, these scenarios also raise the question of what happens if we turn around and give it all back the next night by losing to Michigan? I’ll explore those scenarios tomorrow.