I was getting ready to write my annual post on why the math system the NCAA uses to calculate who gets in to the NCAA tournament, the Pairwise Ranking, makes no sense, when yesterday, College Hockey News announced the NCAA decided to make the system ever worse, by reverting back to an old definition of what a “Team Under Consideration” is. Rather than only comparing the top 25 teams in the RPI, every team with an RPI of .5000 or better will be under consideration.
So why is this change like a worse version of Hitler(no offense, North Dakota fans)? The big reason is that it pushes the number of “Teams Under Consideration” from 25 up to 34. We’ll start with the obvious fact that there’s no reason 58% of the teams in college hockey need to be “under consideration” for the NCAA tournament. That’s more than twice the number of teams that actually get into the tournament. You may as well change the name of the TUC comparison category to the “You’re Not Michigan Tech”(YNT, for short) comparison.
Second, it does nothing to address one of the PWR’s biggest flaws in the TUC–now YNT–”cliff”.