Projecting the NCAA Tournament Field Before the Final Weekend of the Regular Season
Photo By BCEagles.com
Depending on how you look at it, the fact that college hockey’s national tournament participants are selected by a computer algorithm is either great or terrible. A knock against the system is that there’s no eye test. If that were the case, a team like Northeastern almost certainly wouldn’t be sitting on the tournament bubble after a 10-1 beatdown at the hands of Boston College and a weekend sweep against previously winless Vermont. In the reverse case, BC could actually rank higher than No. 4 if a committee took into account the Eagles strength of schedule playing in the Hockey East gauntlet.
There are certainly drawbacks, but one plus everyone can agree on is that the Pairwise ranking system allows fans to put on their prognosticator caps and predict the tournament field with more accuracy than, say, March Madness. Websites like College Hockey News let readers select the results of remaining games, and the formula will spit out the Pairwise rankings. I gave it a go myself last week, and here’s what came out, not taking conference tournaments into account.
Pretty cool, right?
The NCAA also has strict rules when determining which teams are placed where and who will face who. No conference matchups in the first round. A host team must be placed in its region if it qualifies for the tournament. This makes it even easier to project team placements, because Denver and Penn State will have to be in Loveland and Allentown, respectively.
That said, I’m going to give my crack at what the NCAA Tournament field could look like, not using my own projections, but rather using CHN’s Pairwise Probability Matrix, which is the results of 20,000 Monte Carlo simulations of the remaining games prior to Selection Day.” I’m doing this, because their predictions simulate the conference tournaments and because they’ve projected it out 20,000 times to my one.
Here’s how their projections look, as of March 1st:
The first step is to order the top 16 from No. 1 to No. 16 and pair 1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, etc. Note that, while Northeastern is No. 16, the Huskies spot will be taken by Sacred Heart, the team with the best odds to reach the tournament out of Atlantic Hockey. The only conference conflict we run into is No. 4 Boston College vs. No. 13 UMass Lowell. To remedy this, we’ll flip UML and No. 14 Quinnipiac. This setup the following eight matchups:
North Dakota vs. Sacred Heart
Minnesota State vs. Maine
Cornell vs. UMass Lowell
Boston College vs. Quinnipiac
Minnesota-Duluth vs. Ohio State
Denver vs. Arizona State
Penn State vs. Bemidji State
Clarkson vs. UMass
Next, we place the games into one of four regions: Albany, Allentown, Loveland or Worcester. Denver must play in Loveland and Penn State in Allentown, so they get placed first. The wrinkles come with placing the No. 1 seeds. BC should get Worcester and Cornell Albany, but that means No. 1 overall North Dakota would be in Allentown or Loveland, a place where they’d effectively face a home team in the second round. Another option is to send BC or Cornell to Allentown and give North Dakota the open spot. For purposes of this exercise, I’ll put BC in Allentown, but I do think the Eagles have a very real shot of being in their home state for the regionals. Here’s what I came up with once the rest of the matchups were filled in:
Albany Regional:
Cornell vs. UMass Lowell
Minnesota-Duluth vs. Ohio State
Allentown Regional:
Boston College vs. Quinnipiac
Penn State vs. Bemidji State
Loveland Regional:
Minnesota State vs. Maine
Denver vs. Arizona State
Worcester Regional:
North Dakota vs. Sacred Heart
Clarkson vs. UMass
Under this arrangement, each region features teams from four different conferences, something that is going to be very tough to achieve with four or five Hockey East teams potentially qualifying. Even though Worcester doesn’t get BC, the region does land an in-state school in UMass.
Quinnipiac is a tough first round draw for BC, and a de facto road game against Penn State doesn’t lighten the load. BC may actually stand to benefit from dropping a spot in the rankings before the tournament starts. If the Eagles drop to the two-seed line, they’d presumably be there with Denver and Penn State and be locked into Albany or Worcester. Of course they’d then be in a region with a No. 1 seed, but a game in Worcester against Minnesota-Duluth may be more favorable than Allentown against Penn State.
An unlikely, but favorable scenario, is if Nos. 13, 14 and 15 all come from the Hockey East and BC remains on the one-seed line. In that case, BC would have to face the No. 16 seed, as they’d be the only non-Hockey East school on that seed line.
Your head is probably spinning by now with all the different scenarios. The Pairwise makes it far simpler to project the tournament field, but the task is still no piece of cake. With only two Hockey East games and the conference tournament left to play, there is still plenty up for grabs for the Eagles. Winning out should assure BC the final No. 1 seed. An upset paired with a Duluth run could bump the Eagles back down to a No. 2 seed. But, right now, given the situations we’ve run through, the road as a No. 1 seed may be no easier than a No. 2 seed.