5W Providence (H)                  6E St Lawrence (E)
 4W Wisconsin (W)                   3E CO College (W)
      1W Mich State (C)   --+--2E North Dakota (W)
                            |
      2W St Cloud (W)     --+--1E Boston Coll (H)
 3W Michigan (C)                    4E Minnesota (W)
 6W Mercyhurst (M)                  5E Maine (H)


My educated guess about what the committee did:
1. Seed the teams overall from 1 to 12.
2. Starting from 1, alternate assignment to the West Regional and the
East Regional, starting by putting the #1 overall seed (MSU) out West.
3. Swap the resulting 5E (Wisconsin) with the 4W (Minnesota).

Looks like the avoiding intraconference matchups has gone out the
window, though they may still do that in the first round (which wasn't
an issue this year).  I'm not quite sure the reason for step 3, my best
guess being attendance.  I'm not quite sure if they would have put
Mercyhurst 6W regardless of how things worked out, but that's moot
because things did work out that way anyway.

--
 Craig Powers                   NU ChE class of '98
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"Good..bad....I'm the guy with the gun." -- "Ash" in *Army of Darkness*