However, the committee has added a new “bonus points” category this season and intrigued the college hockey community by refusing to disclose its statistical weight.
The new category, adopted on the recommendation of coaches following last spring’s meeting in Florida, allows teams to earn bonus points in the RPI with “quality wins,” defined as non-conference victories over teams with the 15 highest RPI ratings. This has the potential to influence selection because the committee uses the teams’ RPI in a system of comparisons—the PWR, essentially—to arrive at the 16-team field.
Bonus points have added ambiguity to the selection process, and NCAA officials emphasized their intent to keep it that way during a conference call with reporters yesterday afternoon.
“That has not been made known to the public; it’s just going to be something for the committee,” said Ian McCaw, selection committee chairman and athletic director at the University of Massachusetts. “The bonus points aren’t subjective. They’re a mathematical calculation. They don’t add subjectivity, but they add a new factor.”
The impact that bonus points will have on tournament selection and seeding depends on the number of points given for each “quality win” and whether or not that boost will be enough to move teams past those in front of them.
“Bonus points could make a difference, or there could be a reasonable gap between the teams and it wouldn’t make a difference,” said Tom Jacobs, NCAA director of championships. “There might be an impact on the final seeding, but it’s really hard to say at this point because we don’t know the disparity. But I would think they would tend to have a more modest impact than a significant one.”
If Harvard has to rely on an at-large bid to get in, it will hope for the former. The Crimson would be in the tournament if it began today, but today’s PWR does not include bonus points. Given Harvard’s 0-3-1 record against top-15 non-conference teams, the Crimson’s situation in the PWR looks better now than it might actually be.
Travel Concerns
After last season’s regionalized tournament, in which six Eastern teams played in the East Regional because of travel concerns arising from the Sept. 11 attacks, the committee decided in the off-season to make the NCAAs more of a “national tournament,” avoiding intraconference match-ups in the first round when possible.
With war in Iraq appearing imminent, however, questions were asked during the conference call whether this season’s tournament would again be regionalized. Jacobs, for one, did not think that was likely.
“We’re trying to look at all possible contingencies, but we don’t have a policy of a certain mile radius that we’re going to keep teams within,” he said. “As it stands now, we’re business as usual. We’re planning on doing what we did prior to last season. But we’re going to take a look at different factors, and they could change on an hourly basis depending on the state of affairs.”
—Staff writer Jon P. Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.