Editor’s note: NESN’s Tom Caron is on the 50-member USCHO ranking committee, and you can find his votes on the college hockey week that was every Monday on NESN.com.
It’s time to expand.
This weekend, 16 NCAA hockey teams will begin competing for the national championship. There are four regions with four teams apiece. The winner of each region will head to Boston for the Frozen Four in April.
There are some terrific matchups planned for the opening round. Boston University faces 2013 national champion Yale on Friday afternoon in Manchester, N.H. In Providence, Boston College faces Denver in a rematch of last year’s first-round game, which BC won 6-2 on the way to another Frozen Four appearance. This year, the two teams split a pair of games in the Rockies.
Providence, Harvard, and Quinnipiac will also be in action when the tournament begins.
I don’t want to wait until Friday for the games to begin. And I don’t think we should.
This was the fifth year of the NCAA basketball tournament’s “First Four,” a set of four play-in games that expanded the field to 68 teams in 2011. Scoffed at originally, the NCAA goes as far as now calling it the first round — which means 60 teams got a bye through that first round. Regardless, it is now part of the hoops landscape and no one complains about it.
So why not add a set of play-in games for hockey? How great would it be to have a pair of play-in games Tuesday night at the home site of a higher seed? In Hockey East, the conference runner-up UMass-Lowell are on the outside looking in despite a 21-win season. Bowling Green University won 23 games — tied for sixth most in the nation — and is out.
Let’s put those two teams into “first four” games against lower-seeded teams, with the winners heading to the NCAA regional. The 17th and 18th teams in the field could be selected by a committee, which also would decide the two of the 16 teams that would have to play those games.
The committee then would be able to reward teams who were left out in the cold by the Pairwise Ranking, a mathematical formula that has become more and more cumbersome over time. It’s great that the NCAA hockey field is picked purely by the numbers, but having a group use the “eye test” to finalize the field would be great.
In addition, the early games would give college hockey fans a head start on the madness we really love. And would help ensure that the 16 teams remaining are the best in the country.
So let’s expand. And get this party started a little earlier.
Here’s TC’s top 20:
1. Minnesota State
2. Boston University
3. North Dakota
4. Miami
5. Michigan Tech
6. Denver
7. Nebraska-Omaha
8. Minnesota-Duluth
9. Minnesota
10. Quinnipiac
11. Harvard
12. Boston College
13. Providence
14. Yale
15. Minnesota
16. St. Cloud State
17. RIT
18. UMass-Lowell
19. Vermont
20. Bowling Green
And here’s the USCHO.com top 20 poll:
1. Minnesota State
2. Boston University
3. North Dakota
4. Miami
5. Michigan Tech
6. Denver
7. Minnesota-Duluth
8. Minnesota
9. Nebraska-Omaha
10. Harvard
11. Quinnipiac
12. Boston College
13. St. Cloud State
14. UMass-Lowell
15. Providence
16. Bowling Green
17. Yale
18. Colgate
19. Vermont
20. Michigan
Thumbnail photo via Twitter/@Hockey_East
