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The NCAA hockey playoffs got off to a preliminary start filled with suspense and controversy. And that was merely by the selection of the 16 teams that begin play in four regional tournaments this weekend. In some ways, it was an April Fool’s Day joke come early.
Minnesota, the No. 1 ranked team in the country, is host to the West Regional at Xcel Energy Center, where the Gophers will play Robert Morris at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, followed by the 8 p.m. encounter between St. Cloud State and Notre Dame. The two winners will meet Sunday at 6:30 p.m. to determine one of the Frozen Four finalists for the tournament, which will conclude in Philadelphia.
In the Midwest Regional at Cincinnati, Ferris State faces Colgate at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, followd at 7 p.m. by the game between North Dakota and Wisconsin. Those winners meet at 5:30 p.m. Saturday.
In the East Regional - the won UMD won to start on its magical championship run three years ago -- Union takes on Vermont at 1 p.m. Friday, followed by the 4:30 p.m. game between Providence and Quinnipiac at Bridgeport, Conn. Those winners play at 2 p.m. Saturday.
In the Northeast Regional, at Worcester, Mass., Boston College plays Denver at 3 p.m. Saturday, followed by Massachusetts-Lowell facing Minnesota State - Mankato at 6:30 p.m.  The winners meet Sunday at 4 p.m.
How do you pick them? I think St. Cloud State has a great chance to win at Xcel, but the smart money has to be on the Golden Gophers. The West regional winner will advance to Philadelphia for an April 10 semifinal against - drumroll, please - North Dakota. I think the team formerly known as Fighting Sioux will beat Wisconsin, then sneak past the Ferris State-Colgate winner to gain the Frozen Four. In the semifinals, I think North Dakota will get past the Gophers and ride into the final.
 
In the other bracket, Union gets the nod, although this appears to be the least-formidable regional of the four. I think Boston College will beat Denver, but will have a nasty chore before beating MSU-Mankato, which could be the successful darkhorse in the region. That would put BC against Union in the semifinals, and I look for the Boston College Eagles to make it through to the final.
In my crystal ball, North Dakota gets past Boston College in the final to win the national championship.
There are issues to be had with the selection process, which used to be conveniently done with the NCAA committee reviewing the Pairwise computer ratings of the teams to pick the 16 entries for their tournament, then sorting out the rankings to give a 1, a 2, a 3, and a 4 to each regional, trying to avoid conference matchups whenever possible.
But the college hockey landscape has changed dramatically. We used to be able to make a strong case that the WCHA was the strongest league, and one year they even ended up supplying all four regional winners. But the WCHA is shattered into three conferences, the NCHC, the Big Ten, and the combined remains of the WCHA and CCHA.
We could make the case that the NCHC is clearly the toughest collection of elite hockey programs in the country, which was the intention of all eight schools - North Dakota, St. Cloud State, Denver, UMD, Colorado College, Nebraska-Omaha, Miami of Ohio and Western Michigan. But the severity of the competition in the NCHC rendered most of the teams right about at .500, with only St. Cloud State and North Dakota inching above. Miami, picked by the coaches to win the league, finished eighth, then went to St. Cloud to upset the Huskies in two games, and then knock out North Dakota in the semifinals before falling to Denver in the title match, worth an automatic NCAA bid.
St. Cloud State ranked third in the Pairwise before losing to Miami, which dropped the Huskies to No. 9. The semifinal loss to Miami and subsequent third-place victory over Western Michigan dropped North Dakota to No. 14.
In the Big Ten, where the top two teams - Minnesota and Wisconsin - feasted on the weaker bottom teams, the Gophers held No. 1 even while losing to Ohio State in the Big Ten semifinals. Was it political clout or what that caused St. Cloud State to fall six spots while Minnesota didn’t even blink while losing? Similarly, Ferris State held a tie for No. 3 with Union even while losing to MSU-Mankato in the WCHA title game.
North Dakota, a team I think is good enough to go all the way to win the title, almost missed the 16-team field. In fact, when Robert Morris won the Atlantic conference playoff to gain the automatic berth, it came after Robert Morris was ranked No. 47 in the Pairwise. Miami was No. 30, Denver was No. 23, and Ohio State No. 19. Ohio State ran through a string of stirring performances in the Big Ten, beating Michigan State, and then Minnesota, before stalling in the final against Wisconsin in the Buckeyes third game in three nights.
Wisconsin gained the automatic berth by winning, but the Badgers were ranked high enough to make it already, so if Ohio State had beaten the Badgers, the Buckeyes would have entered the NCAA’s select 16 - bumping out North Dakota! So North Dakota owes its entry to the NCAA tournament to Wisconsin, the team UND will face in the regional. It also makes you realize how close UMD was to potential success; had the Bulldogs beaten Western Michigan, it wouldn’t have been an upset to see them win a couple games at Target Center and reach the NCAA field.
To me, the tournament is wide open. I don’t think there is a super team. I do think North Dakota, by being the hottest team in the best conference over the final three months, can rise from the No. 16 seed to win it all.
But it’s time to revise the Pairwise, so that it continues to give strong prominence to overall record and strength of schedule, it can make a subjective adjustment for the toughness of the NCHC, which currently is not reflected. The fault this season lies only with the NCHC teams, which, perhaps realizing how tough every regular-season game and series would be, did not approach all their nonconference games with the same intensity. Losing a few of those games diminished the status of the NCHC teams in the Pairwise.
More credibility should also be given to who has the most success in the final two months, and on the decisiveness of results, rather than just results.
There is no perfect way to do it, but my belief is that each league should submit its own ranking of its top teams, whether by league tournament or regular season, then the NCAA can use the Pairwise only to determine advantages between teams from different conferences.
However they do it, it is sure to be exciting.
It will have to be to outdo the women’s NCAA tournament, where Clarkson astounded everyone but its own players by beating Minnesota 5-4 in the championship game - thus preventing Minnesota from winning its third straight championship and fifth altogether. That leaves UMD as the only women’s hockey team to have won five NCAA titles (Minnesota and Wisconsin have four each), and the Bulldogs also are the only team to have ever won three straight titles, having won the first three NCAA women’s tournaments ever held.