The NCAA revealed its first public edition of its Regional Rankings today. These will be issued every Tuesday leading up to the announcement of the NCAA field on March 8.
The criteria used to rank the teams are:
• Win-loss percentage against regional opponents;
• Strength-of-schedule (only contests versus regional competition) to include:
Opponents’ Average Winning Percentage (OWP) and
Opponents’ Opponents’ Average Winning Percentage (OOWP).
• In-region head-to-head competition;
• In-region results versus common regional opponents; and
• In-region results versus regionally ranked teams.
USCHO.com has its own Pairwise Rankings for the East and West Regions, which attempt to apply these criteria equally, since we don’t know what weight the NCAA is using for each. That would account for the discrepancies between our rankings and the NCAA rankings.
Here are the teams in order as ranked by the NCAA, with the teams’ ranking by winning percentage in parenthesis.
East:
1. Plattsburgh (1)
2. Elmira (6)
3. Amherst (7)
4. Hobart (4)
5. Middlebury (11)
6. Manhattanville (3)
7. Oswego (5)
8. Trinity (9)
9. Norwich (22)
10. Conn College (12)
11. Williams (13)
12. Castleton (16)
13. Neumann (19)
14. Curry (8)
15. Nichols (2)
West:
1. UW-Superior (2)
2. St. Scholastica (3)
3. UW-Stout (4)
4. St. Norbert (5)
5. St. Olaf (6)
6. Gustavus Adolphus (9)
7. St. Thomas (8)
OhhhhhhKayyyy. Check out the West Rankings. No Adrian at all, which the has a winning percentage ranking of #1. We are weighting all criteria evenly, so it looks like the NCAA selection committee is putting a very high weight on strength of schedule, and punishing teams from the ECAC Northeast and MCHA. Look at Nichols and Curry in the East.
I’ll be back shortly with the first edition of D-III Bracketology, and I’ll be using the NCAA rankings, since those are the ones that matter. Until then, let the arguing begin.
