Re: 2013 NCAA Quarterfinal: North Dakota @ Minnesota
(1) The criteria consistently work against the teams in the strongest conference year after year, and the strongest conference happens to be the WCHA right now. Every ranking except for the one the NCAA uses has UND somewhere between 2nd and 5th, not 8th, and has Wisconsin in the top 8. That kind of pattern repeats year after year. And then the fact that pairings end up being based on travel assures that a top seed from the WCHA gets paired with an underrated WCHA team in the quarterfinals. It's now happened three seasons in a row.
(2) The travel funding disparity in the NCAA's treatment of D-I men's and women's hockey permanently regulates the women's tournament to second-class status. NCAA policy is that "revenue-generating" tournaments get a bracket fully seeded with pairings based on limiting intraconference matchups, while all other tournaments get 25-50% seeded and pairings based on limiting travel. I believe D-I college hockey is the ONLY sport where the men get their bracket fully seeded and the women don't. Since the D-I men's hockey tournament is "revenue-generating" and the D-I women's hockey tournament is not, the NCAA would claim it's applying a fair standard and not being discriminatory, but this is nonsense. Men's hockey has had support for decades that women's hockey never had so it's never going to be fair to use a revenue standard to determine the relative travel funding for the two tournaments. You effectively lock in decades of discrimination when you give the D-I men premier status and treat the D-I women's tournament like a D-III tournament. (p.s. Possibly the NCAA would also rationalize the disparity in that the women's tournament is "National Collegiate" and in theory includes D-II programs which don't actually play D-I schedules.)
The NCAA itself initially recognized that it needed to allow some time to allow the women's tournament to grow. The NCAA effectively fully seeded the tournament in the first three seasons from 2005-2007. In 2008, it really pulled the wool over our eyes. The 2008 tournament had two intraconference matchups (one ECAC & one WCHA), but we were told this is what the coaches wanted -- because they thought it was so outrageous that No. 6 Harvard was paired with No. 1 Wisconsin in 2007. Before you knew it, regular intraconference QFs were totally fine, and intra-WCHA matchups became an annual cost-saving tradition.
The committee didn't go off the board. The USCHO PWR just didn't accurately reflect how the committee has been behaving for years now. The posters here who have been following this process for years expected UND to be chosen.
Yes, we all know UND and the WCHA were treated given the criteria and NCAA policy. But it's not "simple as that" because there's plenty of reason to complain about the criteria and NCAA policy:
(1) The criteria consistently work against the teams in the strongest conference year after year, and the strongest conference happens to be the WCHA right now. Every ranking except for the one the NCAA uses has UND somewhere between 2nd and 5th, not 8th, and has Wisconsin in the top 8. That kind of pattern repeats year after year. And then the fact that pairings end up being based on travel assures that a top seed from the WCHA gets paired with an underrated WCHA team in the quarterfinals. It's now happened three seasons in a row.
(2) The travel funding disparity in the NCAA's treatment of D-I men's and women's hockey permanently regulates the women's tournament to second-class status. NCAA policy is that "revenue-generating" tournaments get a bracket fully seeded with pairings based on limiting intraconference matchups, while all other tournaments get 25-50% seeded and pairings based on limiting travel. I believe D-I college hockey is the ONLY sport where the men get their bracket fully seeded and the women don't. Since the D-I men's hockey tournament is "revenue-generating" and the D-I women's hockey tournament is not, the NCAA would claim it's applying a fair standard and not being discriminatory, but this is nonsense. Men's hockey has had support for decades that women's hockey never had so it's never going to be fair to use a revenue standard to determine the relative travel funding for the two tournaments. You effectively lock in decades of discrimination when you give the D-I men premier status and treat the D-I women's tournament like a D-III tournament. (p.s. Possibly the NCAA would also rationalize the disparity in that the women's tournament is "National Collegiate" and in theory includes D-II programs which don't actually play D-I schedules.)
The NCAA itself initially recognized that it needed to allow some time to allow the women's tournament to grow. The NCAA effectively fully seeded the tournament in the first three seasons from 2005-2007. In 2008, it really pulled the wool over our eyes. The 2008 tournament had two intraconference matchups (one ECAC & one WCHA), but we were told this is what the coaches wanted -- because they thought it was so outrageous that No. 6 Harvard was paired with No. 1 Wisconsin in 2007. Before you knew it, regular intraconference QFs were totally fine, and intra-WCHA matchups became an annual cost-saving tradition.
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