> North Dakota, Maine, and New Hampshire will get a bid under any
> circumstances.
> Notre Dame and Nebraska-Omaha will not be at .500 and therefore must get an
> automatic bid to qualify.
> This leaves, in current pairwise order, Colgate, Niagara, Boston College,
> Quinnipiac, Michigan State, St. Cloud, MSU-Mankato, Rensselaer, Minnesota,
> Clarkson, and Cornell. No one whose season is over has any hope (except
> Niagara).
>
> I have eliminated Quinnipiac for the same reasons that they were eliminated
> last year.
>
> If there are no upset winners in conference tournaments, four bids will go
> to Colgate, Niagara, Boston College, and Michigan State. The fifth bid will
> go to St. Cloud, if they win at least one game in the WCHA tournament. if
> St. Cloud loses the consolation game, the bid will go to the winner of
> tonight's Minnesota-Mankato game.
>
> If there is one upset winner, St. Cloud loses out, and the four bids go to
> the four schools listed above, unless the upset winner is one of them, in
> which case we're back to the previous scenario.
>
> Things get hairier with two upsets. For one, Michigan State can still catch
> BC with a better record in the post-season. So a third place finish for both
> teams would put MSU in over BC.
 
A couple of additional comments before I depart for Lake Placid:
 
1. The committee might also elect to drop Niagara, given that their
conference schedule included 5 games against Air Force, whose winning
percentage against a weak schedule makes them look like a much
stronger opponent than they were.  It's not as clear-cut as the
Quinnipiac case, and could probably go either way.
 
2. Keep in mind that ordering by PWR is not how the at-large bids are
chosen.  For instance a bubble team might win comparisons with others
on the bubble and still ned up with a lower PWR by losing comparisons
with Sacred Heart and Lake State; those off-the-bubble comparisons are
irrelevant to the NCAA.
 
3. Rensselaer can win their pairwise comparison with Mankato by
defeating Clarkson in the ECAC consolation game; this means that the
Engineers would make the tournament if two of the following three
things happen:
 
   1. Niagara doesn't get a bid
   2. Mankato State defeats St. Cloud State in the WCHA consolation game
   3. RPI defeats Clarkson in the ECAC consolation game
 
and there are no upsets in the other conference tournaments.
 
BTW, if anyone is having trouble accessing my pages over the weekend,
try using the IP address 209.73.30.9 in place of www.slack.net
 
                                          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?brack
 
HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey;  send information to
[log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.