From this USCHO story:
http://www.uscho.com/news/2002/03/18_004304.php

"I hope that the visionaries of college hockey realize that we have 60
institutions playing Division I college hockey for only five automatic
bids. The math is not in anybody's favor. We have the opportunity to
create more automatics in a very, very easy way.

Do you know what they are? Forget if we don't expand the bracket. There
are two more automatics right under our nose and no one is talking
about it. The Ivy League and Big Ten. Whether we're 12 or 16, those
automatics are there and we're wasting them. The NCAA recommends that
half of the field be automatic bids. Right now, we're at 12, we'll have
six automatics, when we go to 16, we'll have six, we could have eight.

My point is that by having more automatics, we allow everybody, we
could now have 8 automatics for 60 schools, that gives every school a
better shot."

Are we looking at something like this driving an Ivy / ECAC split or
a Big 10 split?

Has this been thought through with regard to the effect of a Big 10
on the CCHA and WCHA, which are not necessarily viable entities
without the Big 10 schools?

And then there's the fact that the main reason fans are enthusiastic
about tournament expansion is the gain in at-large bids, given the
logjam in the 11-16 area of the Pairwise.