Weekly NCAA Tourney Look

Starting this week, I will use the pairwise to predict how the NCAA hockey tournament would look at the time of publication. The beginning of every week, I will present my own bracketology, with the sole intent of showing where teams stand every week. It should be known that the pairwise will constantly be changing, so where a team may be a one seed one week, three weeks later, they may be out of the tournament completely. This is due to the complete lack of powerhouses this year, and a large amount of good-to-great teams. And without any further ado, here's my NCAA bracket for the week of Jan 16, 2012:

West Regional (St Paul - 18,064)

1 UMD 16 Mercyhurst

8 NMU 9 Minnesota

Midwest Regional (Green Bay - 8,709)

2 Ohio State 14 CC

7 Merrimack 10 Western Michigan

Northeast Regional (Worcester - 12,239)

3 Boston U 15 Michigan St

6 Notre Dame 11 UMass Lowell

East Regional (Bridgeport - 8,412)

4 BC 13 Ferris State

5 Michigan 12 Cornell

(Bubble Teams: Miami, Denver)

The Pairwise pretty much set up a perfect bracket. With two eastern teams and two western teams in the top 4, it made choosing where to send the one seeds pretty easy. The only change that needed to be made was moving Michigan State, as their initial matchup was with Ohio State and members of the same conference can't face off in the first round. The choice was either to send MSU to St Paul for Mercyhurst or to Worcester for Colorado College. In this scenario, I felt that none of those three schools were going to make or break a regional by moving, so I decided to reward Minnesota-Duluth for being the overall number one. This meant that they got to keep Mercyhurst as an opponent. Instead, we send State to Worcester to face BU, and Colorado College to Green Bay to face Ohio State. And that folks is how the tourney shapes up as of today.