A look at the 16-team NCAA tournament field

By Adam Wodon

With the postseason underway -- including 17 best-of-three playoff series as well as the Atlantic Hockey and CHA championship games -- this weekend is arguably the most exciting of the season. The CCHA and ECAC have already been through a first-round best-of-three, and the higher seeds came through each time -- though in two cases, three overtimes were needed (Yale and Nebraska-Omaha).

Michigan is likely to earn a spot in the NCAA Tournament, but will the Wolverines be celebrating a Frozen Four victory in Denver next month? Steven King/Icon SMI

Because of the Pairwise Comparisons -- a process the NCAA uses to select and seed the 16-team tournament field -- we are pretty confident these eight are in the tourney: Michigan, North Dakota, Denver, Colorado College, Clarkson, New Hampshire, Michigan State and Boston College. That's three WCHA teams, with St. Cloud State looking like another lock. Four other teams are on the bubble, with three current qualifying if things ended today. Should one conference get seven of 16 bids?

By virtue of its strong non-league record, it's hard to argue based on numbers alone. There is merit, for sure, in the NCAA setting a five-team limit per conference, but that hasn't been done and the current chair is Minnesota's athletic director, a WCHA team.

It's difficult to fully explain the system briefly, so feel free to check out the Pairwise Primer at College Hockey News. To briefly explain, each "team under consideration" is compared to every other "team under consideration." The definition of TUC is a team in the Top 25 of the RPI rankings. The RPI is a strength of schedule adjustment familiar to college basketball fans, but used in every NCAA sport to some degree. In hockey, however, there are three other criteria: record vs. TUC, record vs. common opponents and head-to-head record vs. the team you are comparing.

Each time you win a "comparison" against another team, you get an overall point. Total up the points and you get the list. The whole thing can be found on CHN.

Though it has its flaws, the system does a pretty good job picking the field. The committee has not strayed from this, even going so far as taking the straight Pairwise list to place the teams in exact serpentine order, i.e. 1-16, 2-15, 3-14, etc. The machinations of the system is what keeps the math geeks like me up for hours on end as we approach selection Sunday on March 30. We do a Liveblog of the Pairwise fluctuations throughout that weekend, over at CHN.

Meanwhile, let's take a look at what else is going on around college hockey:

TEAM OF THE WEEK

Union College. It's not every week that a team loses at Brown and still gets honored as Team of the Week. But call this an homage for a season of hard work, one in which Union earned a first-round bye in the ECACs. To put that in context, not only is the little school in Schenectady, N.Y. a non-scholarship school, but it's a Division III school. It doesn't even have the cachet of an Ivy League team. And it was just four years ago when then-president Roger Hull made his now-infamous declaration that he was "proud" when the program finished .400. With those kind of expectations set for the program, and with little financial support, the program was doomed to fail.

Good coaches came and went. But here is Nate Leaman, seeing it through. In his time there, he has seen a new president, some new assistance from the admissions department and at least some optimism.

And in that context, Union -- which has never made the ECAC tournament's final weekend since joining the league in 1991 -- was able to take advantage of a relatively mediocre ECAC season, and place fourth. Yeah, so what the Dutchmen actually lost its last game, when a win or tie would've clinched a spot. Cornell's loss last Saturday -- a team Union has beaten twice -- put the Dutchmen into the final spot.

"It's a season-long accomplishment, so we're OK with that," Leaman said.

"You've got to understand, this program -- this is not a Boston College, it's not even a UMass. We have to take steps, baby steps.

We're working up the ladder here ... with that said, this is a step we need to take and we have to do something in the playoffs now."