NCAA makes tourney changes

In an attempt to reward teams for nonconference wins over quality opponents, the NCAA Ice Hockey Committee will be adding percentage points to the Ratings Percentage Index of teams for those victories beginning this season.

These “good wins,” according to committee chairman Ian McCaw, are triumphs over teams ranked in the Top 15 of the RPI at the conclusion of the conference tournaments.

A road win will be worth more than a neutral-site win and a neutral-site victory will be more pointworthy than a home win.

Losing teams won’t be penalized.

“We want to reward teams that go on the road and beat quality opponents,” said McCaw, the athletic director at the University of Massachusetts and a former University of Maine sports information director and associate athletic director.

“A lot of the established programs have an inordinate amount of home games. If you go on the road and beat a team like that, there should be some type of [extra] benefit,” he added.

One criterion that has been removed from the NCAA Tournament selection process is a team’s performance in its final 16 games.

And another piece of fine-tuning involves a redefinition of teams under consideration.

Teams used to be rewarded for wins against teams “under consideration” and that meant teams whose records were better than .500.

Beginning this season, “teams under consideration” will be teams whose RPI is better than .500.

“Last year, North Dakota finished under .500 record-wise [16-19-2], but they played an extremely strong schedule and had a high RPI. We want to take into consideration wins over teams like that North Dakota team,” said McCaw.

The six-league tournament champions receive automatic berths to the NCAA Tournament and the 10 at-large teams will be decided by the computerized PairWise Rankings.

The 16-team NCAA Tournament field will be announced on March 23 at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN2.

The four, four-team regionals in Worcester, Mass.; Providence, R.I.; Ann Arbor, Mich., and Minneapolis will be on the weekend of March 28-30 and the Frozen Four in Buffalo will be April 10 and 12.

Hockey East teams selected to the NCAA Tournament will have a two-week layoff between the league semifinals and final at the FleetCenter in Boston and the NCAA regionals and a three-week layoff if they lose in this weekend’s Hockey East quarterfinals.

The Hockey East semifinals and final had to be held on March 14-15 because of the FleetCenter’s availability. The FleetCenter is hosting an NCAA basketball regional the next weekend.