It looks as if the WCHA is only going to get three teams into the 
tournament.  Frankly, that's a joke.  While the top of the WCHA may or 
may not be any better than the other conferences, I don't think that 
it's even questionable that the bottom of the WCHA is much, much tougher 
than is the bottom of any other conference.  I've been saying for years 
that the Pairwise is badly flawed, and this is the year that its biggest 
problem really rears its head.  That KRACH is better than RPI is pretty 
obvious, but this isn't the biggest problem.  The biggest is the Record 
vs. Teams Under Consideration criterion.  That this comparison has no 
correction for strength of schedule is a travesty.

Let's look at Wisconsin vs. Miami to see this.  Wisconsin played 28 
games vs. TUCs; Miami played 18.  Of Miami's 18 games, 10 of them were 
played against teams with an RPI .5095 or lower.  Wisconsin played two 
games against TUCs that low; their next lowest rated opponent (Michigan 
Tech) clocks in at .5226, so it isn't even as if I'm selecting an 
egregiously arbitrary break point.  Meanwhile, the highest RPI that 
Miami played was two games against Michigan (RPI .5529).  Wisconsin 
played ten games against Minnesota, St. Cloud and North Dakota, all of 
whom have RPIs higher than Michigan's.  If you control for strength of 
schedule, even using the flawed RPI, Miami's advantage in winning 
percentage against TUCs more than disappears.

It's also pretty telling that, after the top 14 teams are invited to the 
tournament, with a .003 bonus for road nonconference wins, the 15th, 
16th, 17th and 18th ranked teams are all from the WCHA.  The perfect 
storm of PWR flaws showed up this year.

-- 
J. Michael Neal
http://idonotlikeyoueither.blogspot.com/

"Tonight your beauty burns into my memory
the wheel of heaven turns above us endlessly
this is all the heaven we got, right here where we are in our shangrila."

-Mark Knopfler