An early look at the NCAA hockey tournament field

In the NHL, there is the infamous November 1 deadline that all teams are watching.

In the cap era, if you are more than four points out of a playoff spot on that date, your chances of making the playoffs are extremely low. It's certainly not like your season is over, but a lot has to go right and wrong for you for someone else to make the step to the postseason.

There is a similar kind of cutoff in college hockey: November 11th.

If you're not in the Pairwise top 15 by that date, your chances of playing in the NCAA Tournament in March are quite low. Since the tournament field expanded to 16 teams in 2003-04, nearly 61 percent of the teams in the top 15 will ultimately qualify for selection on November 11. That leaves somewhere between four and six teams per year that felt strongly left out at the end of the season.

Last year that number was five: No. 6 Providence, No. 8 New Hampshire, No. 10 Alaska, No. 14 St. Cloud and No. 15 Arizona State. In retrospect, it may seem easy to predict some of these declines. UNH had gone from an 11-win team the year before to a 4-2-1 team with wins over teams like BU, Quinnipiac and Providence. They went on to win 20 games, which is impressive, but dropped a number of results to weaker teams, and their tournament chances became increasingly slim. The two independent states of Alaska and Arizona State were always going to be in a precarious position due to their average quality of opponent; any losses would hurt them disproportionately, and they obviously could never go undefeated, or even get close, for the final 25 or so games of the season. It's worth noting, however, that the non-independent teams on that list finished Nos. 16-18 in the Pairwise, with all narrowly missing the cut, to the point where even one or two more regular wins would have flipped the switch.

Teams outside the top 10 are the most vulnerable to being outpaced by a team that got off to a slower start, but historical qualifying percentages are getting pretty strange, pretty fast. For example, only two-thirds of all teams ranked No. 4 on November 11 made the tournament at all (compared to more than 80 percent for everyone in the top three and almost three-quarters for the No. 5 team).

But that was then, and this is now.

Here are the current top-15 in the Pairwise, next Sunday's key matchup between BC and Maine:

1. Denver
2. Boston College
3. Dartmouth
4. Cornell
5. State of Michigan
6. Minnesota
7. Maine
8. Western Michigan
9. St. Cloud
10. State of Ohio
11. Providence
12. Michigan
13. Harvard
14. Boston University
15. State of Minnesota

These days, we can safely assume that Denver's red-hot start won't fade enough to hurt their chances, even if we can predict with some confidence that they won't go undefeated.

Likewise, we can consider teams like Boston College safe, both because we can expect them to continue winning far more than they lose, and because their competitive quality is absurdly high, since they already field Nos. 5, 8, 9, and 7 the paired. Their only loss to date came against No. 5 Michigan State on the road in the second game of the season.

For virtually any team in the NCHC, Big Ten or Hockey East, losing in the conference won't hurt much as they currently have multiple teams in the top 10, so their strong schedule should remain solid for the rest of the season. Barring big losses to Providence, BU, or Michigan, which are possible but perhaps unlikely, these teams are not entirely safe outside the top 10 given their talent level and overall team quality, but they are also not overly exposed to the risk of dropping out .

Just as Alaska and Arizona State were in the top 15 this time last year, some teams jump off the page as more vulnerable than others. For example, Dartmouth is currently ranked third in the nation in the Pairwise, and while they are undefeated (4-0-0) by a plus-10 margin, even one loss could seriously destabilize their position at this point because they are relatively few have played matches. for most other teams.

To be fair, the ECAC is off to a strong start, with a non-conference winning percentage of .569. That would put the teams expected to perform well in that conference, which includes Dartmouth, in a similar spot to some of the mid-tier Hockey East or Big Ten teams, where they are relatively safe but not exactly in being able to let something slip too badly. Additionally, conference losses for some of the weaker teams in the ECAC could undermine Big Greens NCAA tournament hopes. The same goes for Cornell, which is expected to be the best team in the ECAC, and who knows what to make of Quinnipiac's uncharacteristic start under .500? Harvard is probably in the same boat as Dartmouth, at 2-1-0. Too few games to really know if they're any good, but the Crimson weren't rated highly during the season.

The only other team in the top 15 that really feels vulnerable to a dropout is Minnesota State. The Mavericks are currently 7-4-1, and their standing is bolstered by wins over Michigan and North Dakota. Otherwise, most of the teams they've beaten haven't been very good, and the CCHA collectively doesn't look very strong this year, but if they keep beating weak teams at the same rate as they have so far, it won't matter. As far as the Pairwise is concerned, it is always better to beat a bad team than to lose to a good team.

So that's three teams that will likely drop out, and maybe one or two more from the leagues that have generally done better to start the year. That brings you to the normal four or five teams that will likely fall out of the top fifteen. Who could end up in those places? It probably won't surprise you that most of the rest of the current top 20 seem like good options. The most obvious right now is undefeated Colorado College. The Tigers have currently given up few too many points in OT to be in the top 15, but 8-0-0 is as good as it gets on paper. And 5-4-0 North Dakota should be good too; their losses are all to current top-15 teams (Minnesota State, BU and Cornell). In either case, playing and winning more conference games in the NCHC will increase the quality of competition, and they are widely expected to continue racking up wins throughout the year.

It's also hard to know what to make of No. 17 UMass Lowell. They are 6-2-0, but their competitive quality isn't great. They just split with BU this weekend, which feels about right for where both teams are right now, and their other loss was to expected mid-major NCHC team Minnesota Duluth. They have beaten their opponents by a pretty wide margin, which is good. But they probably won't hit 12.5 percent all year, and last year they were pretty bad offensively, so it's hard to know what their “real scoring talent” is. Right now, all they can do is beat lower-rated opponents, and they do. If they keep this up, they'll feel like a likely NCAA qualifier.

Then there are some slow-starting teams that are expected to perform better than before. Quinnipiac, UMass, Clarkson and Northeastern fall into that category. You also have to take into account the fact that you are basically guaranteed at least two conference winners who would not have received an at-large bid, and obviously it is difficult to predict tournament performance five months in advance.

But the fact remains: we know a lot about the composition of the tournament field so far in advance, precisely because so much is put on the table in the first six weeks of the season.