Given that I just predicted that we had a decent chance of making the NCAA tournament, I figure the time was ripe to start a weekly Bracketology post or two. For the next few weeks, I’ll get out my crystal ball and try to predict what it will take for us to get in the Big Dance – oops, I meant Big Skate.
What I am going to do is take the Pairwise rankings following completion of all the weekend games and project them into NCAA brackets following the methodology used by the selection committee. In order to do so, I will have to predict the winner of each of the six conference tournaments. There are several approaches that I could use to do so (conference standings, Pairwise Rankings, RPI, or KRACH). I’m going to go with KRACH because the conference schedules are still somewhat unbalanced and KRACH is considered by many to be a better ranking system than either RPI or Pairwise.
KRACH predicts the following champions:
Atlantic Hockey: Robert Morris
Big Ten: Michigan
ECAC: Quinnipiac
Hockey East: Boston College
NCHC: St Cloud State
WCHA: Michigan Tech
Two of those teams, Robert Morris (#25) and Michigan Tech (#19), are outside of the top 16 of the Pairwise Rankings so that means #15 and #16 in the Pairwise will be bumped. The last team in the Pairwise to get a bid will be #14 Penn State.
The sixteen qualifiers are then ranked by their pairwise rankings:
- Quinnipiac
- St. Cloud State
- North Dakota
- Boston College
- Providence
- Michigan
- Notre Dame
- Denver
- Nebraska-Omaha
- Yale
- Boston University
- Harvard
- Mass.-Lowell
- Penn State
- Michigan Tech
- Robert Morris
These sixteen teams are then placed in pods of four using the standard S-Curve methodology:
Pod One (1,8,9,16): Quinnipiac, Denver, Nebraska-Omaha, Robert Morris
Pod Two (2,7,10,15): St Cloud St, Notre Dame, Yale, Michigan Tech
Pod Three (3,6,11,14): North Dakota, Michigan, Boston U, Penn State
Pod Four (4,5,12,13): Boston College, Providence, Harvard, UMass-Lowell
The four regional host cities for 2016 are:
East: Albany NY (hosted by Union)
Northeast: Worcester Mass (hosted by Holy Cross)
Midwest: Cincinnati Ohio (hosted by Miami)
West: St Paul Minn (hosted by Minnesota)
Since none of the host schools made the tournament we don’t have to worry about the NCAA rule that host schools get to play at home.
Each top seed is then placed in the regional closest to it resulting in the following:
Quinnipiac gets the Northeast #1 (Worcester)
St Cloud State gets the West #1 (St Paul)
North Dakota gets the Midwest #1 (Cincinnati)
Boston College gets the East #1 (Albany)
Note: Quinnipiac in Hampden CT is about 50 miles closer to Worcester MA than it is to Albany NY. As the #1 overall seed, they should probably be placed where it is most convenient for their fans. That said, it is also entirely possible that for the good of the overall tournament, the Quinnipiac pod and the BC pod might switch locations – we’ll take another look at that later.
The pods are then inspected to avoid two teams from the same conference having to play each other if at all possible.
There are three immediate problems. Pod Four has three Hockey East schools (BC, Providence, and UMass-Lowell). Pod Three has two Big Ten schools (Michigan and Penn State). Pod One has Nebraska-Omaha and Denver from the NCHC. We can solve this by swapping UMass-Lowell with Penn State and Nebraska-Omaha with Boston U (because Hockey East has five schools getting a bid, we can’t avoid placing two teams in the same regional, so we will leave Providence in the East Regional).
Lastly, we take a look at any shuffling that might be considered for attendance reasons. Because we have three Boston area schools (BC, Providence, and Harvard) still in the East Regional it probably makes sense to swap the Albany and Worcester pods.
That makes the final groups look like this:
East (Albany NY): Quinnipiac, Denver, Boston U, Robert Morris
Northeast (Worcester MA): Boston College, Providence, Harvard, Penn State
Midwest (Cincinnati OH): North Dakota, Michigan, Nebraska-Omaha, UMass-Lowell
West (St Paul Minn): St Cloud St, Notre Dame, Yale, Michigan Tech.
The net result of all this for Penn State fans is that we predict Penn State to face #4 Boston College in Worcester MA in the opening round.