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