NCAA D3 NPI is here
The NCAA has published the initial NPI ranking for D3 womens hockey. Here, we take a look at the ramifications, as things stand for now.
The NCAA has published the initial NPI (NCAA Power Index) ranking for D3 women's hockey. This is important because as of this season, NPI will be the sole criterion used to determine the at-large berths for the NCAA tournament at the end of the season. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at this initial ranking to see which conferences are likely to gain multiple bids.
One thing this article will not be is a bracketology post. There's still a lot of uncertainty in the field, with two weeks left in the regular season and all the conference tournaments yet to be played. Until the field is set and the rankings finalized, there's no reason to start slotting teams into a bracket based on seedings and geography. Instead, I wanted to take more of a big-picture approach and look at which teams might have realistic postseason aspirations.
A refresher about format: the D3 women's tournament this year will include 12 teams. Of those, eight will be the teams that win their conference championship and claim their conference's automatic qualifier (AQ) berth (sometimes referred to as a Pool A bid). The conferences with AQs are CNE, NEHC, NESCAC, SUNYAC, UCHC, and MAC in the east region, and MIAC and NCHA in the west region. The other four teams in the tournament will be those with the highest NPI who do not get an AQ, colloquially referred to as at-large or Pool C bids.
(What about Pool B? Last year, there was a such thing as Pool B. Those were special at-large bids reserved for the highest-ranked teams not eligible for a Pool A bid: those in conferences without an AQ, and independents. Under last year's selection criteria, D3 women's hockey had one Pool B bid, which went to UW-River Falls, the eventual undefeated champion. But this year, Pool B has gone away, and all the at-large bids are open to all the teams. If UW-River Falls is going to repeat, they'll need to earn a Pool C bid in competition with the other 71 teams who don't get a Pool A bid.)
So, let's look at the top 15 teams in the NPI list, reproduced here from the NCAA’s table.
Remember that eight conferences have AQs for their champions, which won’t be determined until the conference tournaments are over. If we assume that the team with the highest NPI in a conference will win that conference’s Pool A bid, we can start working our way down to project the at-large bids. (Note, however, that the team with the highest NPI in a conference is not necessarily the team at the top of that conference's standings!) Based on the current ranking, Middlebury (NESCAC, NPI #1), Augsburg (MIAC, NPI #2), Plattsburgh (SUNYAC, NPI #6), Endicott (CNE, NPI #8), St. Norbert (NCHA, NPI #11), and Wilkes (MAC, NPI #14) are in line for AQs. Take those out, as they won't need at-large bids, to leave behind a subset of the above table:
The top four of these teams would get the Pool C bids in this scenario: Gustavus Adolphus (MIAC, NPI #3), Amherst (NESCAC, NPI #4), UW-River Falls (WIAC, NPI #5), and Oswego (SUNYAC, NPI #7). Filling out the bracket would be the top teams from the two other conferences that have AQs: Norwich (NEHC, NPI #17) and Nazareth (UCHC, NPI #19). The first four teams left out would be Cortland (SUNYAC, NPI #9), Colby (NESCAC, NPI #10), Bowdoin (NESCAC, NPI #12), and Adrian (NCHA, NPI #12).
If this scenario actually happens, there would be three two-bid conferences (MIAC, NESCAC, and SUNYAC) and six conferences would be one-bid conferences (WIAC, CNE, NCHA, MAC, NEHC, and UCHC). The MASCAC, which does not have an AQ available, would be left out as its highest-placed team is Plymouth State (NPI #41), well below the at-large cut.
Melissa D. Hellman
But wait! The season isn’t over yet. All these teams have two to four regular season games remaining. Since we only have one set of NPI rankings, it’s hard to know how much can change from winning or losing a game. But there are two pairs of regular season games remaining in which top-15 conferencemates play each other: Middlebury (#1) and Colby (#10) end the season with a pair of games against each other, as do Oswego (#7) and Cortland (#9). These games could affect not just NPI rankings but seedings within the conference tournament, which in turn could affect how easy a road each team has to a conference championship and AQ.
Every team in the top 15 also has a conference tournament to get through, and a conference tournament can have only one winner. There are four NESCAC teams in the top 15; at least three of those teams will lose at least one more game this season. Ditto for the three SUNYAC teams, the two MIAC teams, the two NCHA teams, and the two MAC teams.
My takeaways from all this:
- Middlebury probably has a bid locked up, barring a first-rate apocalypse. Their NPI is nearly 3 points more than second-place Augsburg, which gives them a bigger cushion than anyone else if they crash out early.
- UW-River Falls, the reigning champion, is currently positioned high enough to defend their title. However, they’d be best served by winning out the season, to ensure they don’t slip in the rankings as the NESCAC and SUNYAC beat up on themselves. With no AQ, they don’t have a safety net.
- The NESCAC seems likely to put two teams in. Right now, Amherst sits comfortably in the second at-large position, and Colby and Bowdoin are the second and third teams out. However, Colby ends the regular season by hosting Middlebury, and a couple of wins there could vault them into an at-large position pending the conference tournament results.
- The SUNYAC is likely to come down to the wire, both for who wins the AQ and how many teams get in. Plattsburgh, Oswego, and Cortland have all clinched conference playoff berths, but the seeding could come down to the final weekend home-and-home between Oswego and Cortland. Although Plattsburgh has the highest NPI in the conference, they trail both Oswego and Cortland in the conference standings based on points percentage. The top seed will play a weaker opponent in their semifinal, leaving the other two teams to duke it out for a spot in the final and a chance at the AQ, and there are plenty of opportunities for NPIs to shuffle.
- What kind of difference in NPI between teams is significant? That’s a fine question, since this is the first year of NPI and this is the first week the NCAA has released their rankings. When next week’s rankings come out, we might be able to correlate results from the week’s games with changes in NPI, to see how much a game or a weekend affects the NPI and changes the rankings. The conference tournament weeks and their ranking releases will also help elucidate how individual games affect NPI.
For the teams in one-bid conferences, the only path into the NCAA tournament will be winning their conference championship. No other team in those conferences has a high enough NPI ranking to get an at-large bid; that is unlikely to change over the rest of the season. The only possible exception is UW-River Falls, which does not have an AQ available; should they lose between now and the end of the conference tournament, it remains to be seen how far they drop in the rankings, given that of the four teams ahead of them in the rankings, at least two will lose (and presumably see their NPI fall). As for the rest, it'll be an interesting four weeks as we all see what shakes out.
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