But when missing players are taken into account, it becomes clear that Harvard had the better season. For instance, Harvard was missing Crystal Springer, Kalen Ingram, and Kiirsten Suurkask in its first loss to Dartmouth, while Brown was missing Tara Mounsey in its loss at Minnesota. The Golden Gophers had absolutely no kind of adversity to play through.
I seriously doubt that the selection committee looked deeply enough into the statistics. Likely the committee blindly stood by them, because it backed the false notion that East-West parity actually exists in women's college hockey. In other words, the committee used objective statistics to pick the two at-large teams, but failed to objectively analyze whether its stats were actually valid.