NCAA Women's Frozen Four

The Women's Frozen Four starts tonight in Duluth. Wisconsin and Harvard will face-off at 5pm CST today, while the host team, UMD will play New Hampshire.

Don't ask me how, but Bruce Ciskie got permission from the NCAA to live-blog the event. I'd check it out, if for no other reason than Ciskie probably had to do some pretty degrading stuff to get that permission.

Uh Oh

So yesterday was Selection Sunday for the women's NCAA tournament, and it turns out there was a pretty big surprise. Clarkson was not in the field, even though the PWR said they should have been in.

USCHO's David De Remer has a little more explanation. Basically, Clarkson had a better RPI, TUC record, and Common Opponent record than Dartmouth, but Dartmouth was 1-0-1 on the season against Clarkson, and the committee decided to award that last spot to Dartmouth.

First off, I think this decision sucks for Clarkson. But it also raises the question of whether this could happen with the men's tournament. Even though the PWR has correctly predicted the tournament for however many years, it's not the exact formula the committee uses, and they could make some changes.

There's actually a possibility of a similar situation happening on the men's side. There's still plenty of hockey left to play, but it could end up that St. Cloud and Minnesota State fight it out for one of the tournament's last at-large spots. St. Cloud wins that comparison 3-to-2, but Minnesota State won both meetings between the teams this season. The situation is muddied even more because if Michigan Tech drops just three spots in the RPI, Minnesota State would take a 3-2 lead in that comparison.

So would the selection committeee go against tradition in a situation like this? I would hope not. I've always been strongly in favor of total transparency in the NCAA tournament selection process, even if there are a few bugs in the system. Head-to-head is important, and I believe it is counted as so in the Pairwise, but if a team is that much better during the regular season, one odd weekend shouldn't cancel that out.

The selection process could probably use an overhaul. I think everyone cringes at the fact that North Dakota would benefit by losing a game to Michigan Tech this weekend. But the time to make those changes should be the day after this year's field is selected, not the day before it is selected.

Minnesota Girl's HS Tournament

The Minnesota Girl's State Hockey Tournament gets underway today at the XCel Center. There's been a good deal of discussion around the state about the tournament being moved to the X, out of Title IX considerations, rather than keeping the tournament at the more appropriately-sized Ridder Arena in Minneapolis, but the feeling I've got is that the girls don't particularly care, so long as they're actually playing in the state tournament.

Jon Marthaler is live-blogging from the X. Alexandria won the first game of the day over South St. Paul, while Roseau currently leads New Prague 1-0.

Tomorrow, Benilde-St. Margaret's plays Cretin-Derham Hall and Elk River meets Eden Prairie.