According to an article at
http://www.uscollegehockey.com/news/2000/07/25_finalbids.html the NCAA
Men's Division I Ice Hockey Committee has, as expected, reduced the
number of automatic bids to each of the four major conferences to one,
to be given to the conference's choice of regular season or playoff
champion.  (The last time this was the case, all four chose the winner
of the conference tournament.)  Both the "Colorado College rule"
giving an auto bid to the RS winner and the "Clarkson rule" giving an
automatic bye to a team winning both the RS and tournament
championships in its conference no longer apply.  The article also
says byes will be awarded based on the selection criteria "without
respect to region", which represents a change from the previous
method, where the two byes in the East Regional were guaranteed to go
to Eastern teams and likewise in the West.

The committee apparently did not make any changes to the selection
criteria themselves, so presumably they will continue somehow
considering the strength of each conference to overrule the criteria
when they deem necessary, as they did in the case of Quinnipiac's
non-selection the past two years and Niagara's seeding in the most
recent tournament.
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                 [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/

Consider the alternative: http://slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?kpairwise