In the end, all the drama between the BC-UMD selection turned out to be irrelevant, as all the top seeds won their conference tournaments.
As discussed in earlier posts, given the closeness of BC-UMD and Wisconsin-Mercyhurst, I see no reason why the NCAA committee would not swap the two teams, leaving a bracket as follows:
BC at (1) Wisconsin
SLU at UNH
Harvard at Dartmouth
UMD at (2) Mercyhurst
The one source of drama that really remains, is will the committee swap BC and Harvard to avoid the Harvard-Dartmouth intraconference matchup? I have nothing new to say here, but here’s the comparison between the teams.
Boston College vs Harvard
RPI     0.5646 0          0.5861 1
L16   12- 4- 0 1        11- 4- 1 0
TUC    9- 9- 2 0        12- 6- 2 1
H2H             1                  0
COP   12- 7- 2 0        16- 5- 2 1
============================================
PTS             2                  3
As I said in the previous column, Harvard leads by a considerable margin in three of the categories. BC leads by half-a-game in one category, and its head-to-head win was in triple overtime.
So given Harvard’s margin over BC, I do not believe the committee should sacrifice the bracket integrity to avoid an intraconference matchup between Harvard and Dartmouth. I don’t think it’s a huge difference, since both Harvard and BC played in January. So we’ll see what happens at 6 p.m. tonight.
