March 25, 2008 01:41 am
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The first time I suspected something was a little strange about the Pairwise rankings was about nine years ago when I witnessed a pair of Western Collegiate Hockey Association coaches hunched over a laptop and crunching numbers just minutes before their teams played each other in the Final Five.
While their players were getting ready to battle it out on the ice rink, some of college hockey’s most important decisions were actually being made in computer calculations in cyberspace.
This can’t be the future of the sport, I thought.
Well, it turns out, it was.
On Sunday morning, Minnesota State got slashed by a slide rule.
The Mavericks missed out on a bid to the NCAA tournament when the final scores and numbers were inputted into the HAL 9000 Saturday night, and the Pairwise rankings were spit out.
Astonishingly, Wisconsin and its losing record, including a 1-2-1 mark against the Mavericks, got into the field of 16.
“I don’t understand how it happened,” Mavericks goalie Mike Zacharias said Monday, “how a sub-.500 team made it over us.”
Since Madison is also hosting the Midwest Regional this weekend, many in Mankato are also crying foul — or, worse, conspiracy — as Wisconsin is bound to fill up the Kohl Center when it plays Denver Saturday evening.
However, the committee, chairman and University of Minnesota athletic director Joel Maturi said Monday, there was no funny business. It went straight by the numbers.
“In the case of Minnesota State, it certainly was a difficult thing to do,” Maturi said. “But the coaches have insisted that we not let circumstances change things. We had to go by the numbers. ... As a committee, we didn’t feel it was fair to change that this year.”
While the often-confusing Pairwise formulas have been tweaked from time to time over the years, there haven’t been huge quarrels with the resulting tournament fields.
But it was only a matter of time until we’d stumble upon a flaw in the formula.
In this case, not only is Wisconsin in with a 15-16-7 record, but Notre Dame — which is actually the team that bumped MSU out — secured its spot in the field by losing to Northern Michigan Saturday afternoon.
When Princeton, a team the Mavericks walloped 6-1 in December, won the ECAC tournament and that conference’s automatic bid, Minnesota State was officially out. Had Harvard won that game, the Mavericks would be preparing to play New Hampshire or Miami right now.
“I was hoping the committee would find a way to get us in,” MSU senior Joel Hanson said. “I don’t know how we dropped two spots in one night. I don’t know how Wisconsin came up so fast.”
Neither the Mavericks nor the Badgers was in action last weekend.
College hockey has often boasted that its selection process is the most transparent; that, for weeks, the Pairwise are out there for everyone to see; that the field is set before the committee even convenes to set the matchups.
“The computer only gives you information based on what you put in there,” Maturi said. “I suppose you could ask: Are we putting the right things in there?”
This year, the human element seemed to be missing.
Shane Frederick is a Free Press staff writer. Access his college hockey blog through mankatofreepresshockey.blogspot.com/
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