4 Top Seeds All Set; Augustana Intrigue on the Bubble
by Adam Wodon/Managing Editor (@chn-adam-wodon)
The four No. 1 seeds are all set. One-hundred percent.
How is this possible? Well, three of the four teams are done playing before selection day — North Dakota, Michigan State and Western Michigan. Therefore, none of their NPIs will move very much over the next week, and there’s enough of a gap between them all that it won’t matter. Michigan, which has moved back to No. 1, has just one game remaining — its Big Ten championship game against Ohio State — but a loss there is not enough to move it down to No. 2.
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This, and the fact that all three of those teams now have 10 or 11 days off before their next game, are a consequence of going to fully on-campus tournaments. Because they are on campus, they are spread out over three weeks. You lose in the semifinals, and you get a weekend off. The Big Ten mitigated this to some degree by moving its quarterfinals to mid-week prior to the semis, but they had to, because they had it even worse, with one team needing to take the last weekend of the regular season off.
In any event, what it does is enable us to have the No. 1 seed placement conversation a full week early.
None of the four are locked into any one place, but given that all the Michigan teams have to fly to any of the four Regionals, it doesn’t make a difference. Therefore, I think it makes logical sense that North Dakota will be in Sioux Falls, given that it’s relatively close.
Of course, the term “close” is relative. Out West, the 300-something miles from Grand Forks to Sioux Falls is relatively close. In the Northeast, you can hit about five major cities and 10 mid-sized ones in a span of 300 miles.
That said, Michigan to Sioux Falls is over 800 miles, and still over 500 miles to Albany. It gets worse from there.
So I think it’s pretty iron-clad that Michigan will be in Albany and North Dakota in Sioux Falls.
From there, it kinda depends where Denver ends up in the overall rank.
Denver is the host in nearby (60 miles) Loveland, Colo., and must be there. But it will be there as a 2 seed. The question is whether it will be a 2 seed at 5th overall, or a 2 seed at 7th overall. At 5th overall, it would line up naturally in the serpentine nature of bracketing a tournament, with the 4th overall, which is Western Michigan. At 7th overall, it would line up with 2nd overall, which is North Dakota, which isn’t going anywhere, so I think Michigan State would go to Loveland.
In my opinion, however, the Committee should avoid another potential Western Michigan-Denver matchup in the second round at all costs. There is no reason why Michigan State can’t go to Loveland no matter what, and Western to Worcester. Back in the day, this was very much a thing — avoiding second-round matchups among teams from the same conference, especially if they just played each other in their conference tournament (which Denver and WMU did, in the semis). It was like that through the 1990s and early 2000s. Then the Committee just chucked the concept out the window and never went back to it in the 20 years since.
I’ve always argued that this should still be a thing. It’s a national tournament, and we don’t want to see the same matchup that just happened, happen again. Let those teams both try to make the Frozen Four from different Regions. But the Committee has never listened to me on that.
So we wait and see how Denver does in the NCHC championship game.
So what would we have for First Round matchups? This is still a bit of a crapshoot. Even the 1-16 matchup is up in the air. Michigan will not necessarily get the Atlantic Hockey champ, because if Clarkson wins the ECAC title, its NPI will likely be below the Atlantic champ.
If there isn’t an “upset” tournament winner, the most likely 15th overall would be Minnesota State, Connecticut or Massachusetts. If UConn and UMass both lose in the semis, however, it’s still possible for Augustana to slide back into the top 15.
If Augustana does sneak in, there may be a little intrigue there. Augustana is literally located in Sioux Falls, but it’s not the host of the Regional, so technically, it’s not required to be placed there. Would the Committee really do otherwise, though? Seems unlikely, whether Augustana ends up 15 or 14.
What happens with all the 2/3 seeds at this point is anyone’s guess. There’s too many possible combinations to try to figure it out. However, of those eight teams likely to be 5-12 overall, only Denver, Minnesota Duluth, Dartmouth and Cornell are still playing.
Just remember this, they will try to line the teams up in serpentine order, meaning 1-16-8-9, 2-15-7-10, 3-14-6-11, 4-13-5-12. But the Committee will flip things around to avoid intra-conference matchups, and somewhat to help tweak attendance in a Regional. Though given the teams involved, it’s most likely there will be enough Eastern teams close to Albany/Worcester that it will just fall naturally enough.
The intrigue really lies in which team Denver will play, because Denver is the only school locked into a location. Holy Cross is hosting in Worcester, and that would’ve created an interesting wrinkle, but the Crusaders lost in the semis.
Everything else will fall in line once we know the teams, and where those final two 1 seeds are headed.
If you want to project winners and see how it will line up, check out CHN’s You Are the Committee tool.