Welcome back to Bracketology.
Between now and March 22 — Selection Sunday for the men’s Division I NCAA Ice Hockey Championship — we’ll provide in this space an up-to-date prediction of the 16-team NCAA field, seeded into regionals according to the guidelines set out by the NCAA Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Committee.
As always, we’re doing this using the NCAA Power Index (NPI), not the PairWise.
First, we need the field. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll keep it simple and use the top of the NPI as our backbone — but with the same caveat as recent weeks: every conference needs representation. Right now, the top 16 does not include an Atlantic Hockey America team, so we’ll take the top AHA team in the NPI as the conference representative. This week, that’s Bentley.
So our 16-team field (using overall seeds 1-16) is: Michigan, Michigan State, North Dakota, Minnesota Duluth, Western Michigan, Penn State, Wisconsin, Dartmouth, Quinnipiac, Denver, Cornell, Providence, St. Thomas, Augustana, Boston College, and Bentley.
Now we do the part that has to be done correctly every single time: build the four pods according to bracket integrity. That means the initial four pods are:
1-8-9-16
2-7-10-15
3-6-11-14
4-5-12-13
So, on the first pass, that gives us:
1 Michigan / 8 Dartmouth / 9 Quinnipiac / 16 Bentley
2 Michigan State / 7 Wisconsin / 10 Denver / 15 Boston College
3 North Dakota / 6 Penn State / 11 Cornell / 14 Augustana
4 Minnesota Duluth / 5 Western Michigan / 12 Providence / 13 St. Thomas
Now we ask the first question the committee asks: do we have any same-conference first-round matchups?
And yes, in the 1-8-9-16 pod, we’d have Dartmouth and Quinnipiac playing in the first round. Both are ECAC teams, and the committee does everything it can to avoid those intra-conference first-round games.
So how do we fix it without breaking seed bands? We can’t just shuffle teams anywhere we want — we have to keep swaps within the same band (1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16), and we want a fix that doesn’t create a new problem elsewhere.
The cleanest move is to swap within the 5–8 band: Switching Dartmouth with Wisconsin. That keeps all teams in their existing band, removes the ECAC-first-round issue immediately, and doesn’t create a new intra-conference matchup in another pod.
After that switch, our pods become:
1 Michigan / 7 Wisconsin / 9 Quinnipiac / 16 Bentley
2 Michigan State / 8 Dartmouth / 10 Denver / 15 Boston College
3 North Dakota / 6 Penn State / 11 Cornell / 14 Augustana
4 Minnesota Duluth / 5 Western Michigan / 12 Providence / 13 St. Thomas
Now we can move to site placement. Same process as always: are any regional hosts in the field, and if so, they’re tied to their hosted site.
This year’s regional hosts are Holy Cross in Worcester, Union in Albany, Omaha in Sioux Falls, and Denver in Loveland. Only one of those teams is in the field this week: Denver.
So that means we have exactly one hard lock: Denver plays in Loveland. So we place Michigan State / Dartmouth / Denver / Boston College in Loveland.
Now we’re left assigning the other three pods to Worcester, Albany, and Sioux Falls. Let’s start with the easiest: Sioux Falls. Both North Dakota and Augustana are in the same pod right now, so we place North Dakota / Penn State / Cornell / Augustana in Sioux Falls. That’s a guaranteed sellout.
Now we have two pods left for two eastern sites, and the question becomes: what helps Albany and Worcester the most?
Worcester will benefit from having Providence in the building, and Albany is a natural fit for Quinnipiac and Bentley in terms of geography. So we place the Minnesota Duluth pod in Worcester and the Michigan pod in Albany. But the Worcester attendance is still a concern as Providence alone won’t fill much of the building and Minnesota Duluth, Western Michigan and St. Thomas are all question marks. Could we make one more switch? We could place Boston College in Worcester and move St. Thomas to Loveland. You’re swapping the 13th and 15th seeds. Is that allowed? Yes.
So let’s do it.
That leaves us with the final bracket:
Last in: Boston College
First out: Boston University