As NCAA tournament approaches, who’s in and who’s out?
By this time next week, the NCAA tournament field will be set. But between now and then, there will be dozens of conference playoff games that will have huge implications for not just the teams involved in each of those games, but those around them in the national Pairwise rankings as well.
Technically, almost every team still playing has a chance to make the NCAA tournament. Any team that’s in a conference and still playing can theoretically win that conference tournament — sorry to independents Long Island, Alaska, and Arizona State — to automatically qualify for the NCAAs. But we’ll get to those teams in a minute.
First, let’s talk about the teams that are widely considered to have qualified with an at-large bid already. According to the indispensable College Hockey News Pairwise Probabil