First NCAA Rankings Are Out

And here they are.

Check back for the latest Bracketology tomorrow. In the meantime, an observation:

We know that the NCAA does not apply the selection/ranking criteria equally. You can see this by comparing USCHO’s PWR with the rankings. I’m having a hard time figuring this out. Looking at Mass-Dartmouth, you’d think that the NCAA is weighing Quality Wins more heavily, since the Corsairs are fifth in the NCAA rankings but second in the USCHO PWR. But then look at Norwich, which is even lower than Mass-Dartmouth in Quality Wins and yet is ranked ahead of he Corsairs in the NCAA rankings. And it can’t be that record against ranked teams is given more weight, because that favors UMD as well.

Instead, you appear to have a lot of subjectivity, as we saw last season. I’ll be using the NCAA ranking for bracketology, since it looks like there’s no way the PWR can predict what the committee will be doing.

And it’s worth noting that the NCAA Division I committee applies their criteria strictly by the book. One wonders why the D-III committee does not.