There is a pretty misleading statement on the front page of US College
Hockey Online:  "For the third straight season, the Pairwise Rankings
accurately assessed the 12 NCAA tournament bids."  It is true that the
field of twelve does happen to be the top twelve teams in the pairwise
rankings (excluding Quinnipiac), but the NCAA has told us that they
look not at overall PWR but at the pairwise comparisons among "bubble
teams".  This season the choice of the field was sensitive to how the
bubble was chosen.  The same twelve teams also appear in the
tournament if you define a four-team bubble of OSU, NMU, Notre Dame
and RPI, either a priori or after eliminating Princeton.  Among those
four teams, OSU and NMU each win two out of a possible three
comparisons.
 
We won't know for sure how exactly the field was chosen until the
committee provides us with an explanation this week, but to imply that
it was done simply on the basis of PWR is detrimental to the process
of educating the college hockey public.
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                  [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
Play along at home at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?tourney
 
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