{"id":20,"date":"2010-09-29T22:14:24","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T03:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uscho.com\/faq\/"},"modified":"2014-11-26T15:34:46","modified_gmt":"2014-11-26T21:34:46","slug":"ncaa-selection-process","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/faq\/ncaa-selection-process\/","title":{"rendered":"NCAA Division I men’s tournament selection process"},"content":{"rendered":"
Not clear about how teams are selected for the NCAA Division I men’s hockey tournament? You’re not alone.<\/p>\n
Compared to other NCAA sports, hockey has a fairly clear-cut process of determining which teams make the field. But how the NCAA men’s ice hockey committee makes out the bracket on selection Sunday is another story.<\/p>\n
Here’s our best effort at answering questions about that process:<\/p>\n
Q: How many teams are in the tournament?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: Sixteen.<\/p>\n Q: Who is on the selection committee?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: The current makeup of the Division I men’s ice hockey committee can be found at the Division I men’s tournament page<\/a>. This page also includes a bracket (when available), lists (such as past tournament winners), and other data.<\/p>\n Q: How is the field broken down?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: The tournament is split into four regions — East, Northeast, West and Midwest — with four teams in each. The No. 1 seed plays the No. 4 in the first round, and No. 2 plays No. 3. The winners play each other in the regional final, with those four winners advancing to the Frozen Four.<\/p>\n Q: How are the tournament teams determined?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: Each conference receives one automatic bid. Currently this includes six Division I conferences. The rest of the teams are selected through a series of mathematical and other criteria. Either way, there is no subjectivity in the process of selecting<\/em> teams for the tournament.<\/p>\n Q: How do you receive an automatic bid?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: Starting with the 2000-01 season, the committee elected to revert to the practice of awarding only one automatic bid to each conference. A conference has the choice of how to award its automatic bid; all have elected to award it to their postseason tournament champion.<\/p>\n Q: What was the “Colorado College rule”?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: In 1994, Colorado College won the WCHA regular-season title, but did not receive a berth to the NCAA tournament. Soon after, the NCAA started awarding conferences two automatic bids, which meant both the regular season and tournament champions got in. That rule, which was nicknamed the Colorado College rule, was later rescinded.<\/p>\n Q: What is the “Clarkson rule”?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: The so-called Clarkson rule said that any team which won its regular season and conference tournament championship would automatically be awarded a first-round bye in the NCAA tournament. This rule is no longer in effect.<\/p>\n Q: How is RPI calculated?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: RPI, or Ratings Percentage Index, is a value made up of three weighed factors — a team’s winning percentage (25 percent), its opponents’ winning percentage (21 percent) and its opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage (54 percent). The opponent’s winning percentage is the average winning percentage of each opponent, not the total winning percentage based on the sum of all wins, losses and ties. If a team’s RPI goes down as a result of a victory, that game is thrown out of the equation so that team is not penalized for a victory. Starting in the 2013-14 season, a weight was applied to home and away results<\/a> to reward teams for road victories and a quality wins bonus was added to reward teams for wins over teams in the top 20 of the RPI.<\/p>\n Q: Are media or coaches polls used to determine who else gets in the tournament?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: No, only the objective numerical rankings are used.<\/p>\n Q: How are<\/em> the at-large teams selected?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: The committee uses criteria spelled out in its publicly available manual to determine which at-large teams make the NCAA tournament. First, only teams with a winning percentage of .500 or better that have played at least 20 games against Division I teams are eligible to be an at-large selection. All teams are are compared against each other and ordered by the number of comparisons they win. That process is mimicked by USCHO’s PairWise Rankings, about which a full explanation is available here<\/a>. The committee maintains its own rankings, but, to the best of our knowledge, when one sees the PairWise Rankings, it sees essentially the same data the committee sees.<\/p>\n Q: Is choosing the field based on the opinion of the committee at all?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: In practice, not really. However, language in the committee’s manual indicates that the committee “reserves the right to evaluate each team based on the relative strength of its respective conference using the overall conference RPI and conference comparisons (e.g., Conference A’s won-lost record versus Conference B, etc.) in determining competitive equity.”<\/p>\n Q: What were “bonus points,” and what happened to them?<\/strong><\/p>\n