With the top teams all struggling this weekend, Colorado College landed at No. 1 in the USCHO.com Division I Men’s Poll following a split with No. 14 St. Cloud State. The Tigers, which lead the WCHA and have an overall record of 23-4-5, are also first in the USCHO.com Pairwise Rankings (PWR), a computer model for NCAA tournament selection.
No. 2 Cornell received 10 of the 40 first-place votes and moved up one spot after a 2-2 tie with unranked Brown and a 4-3 road win over No. 15 Harvard. Cornell is 5-2 against teams ranked in the top 15, while Harvard is 0-5-1. The Big Red sit at No. 3 in the PWR with 25 points.
At No. 3 in the poll and No. 2 in the PWR is Maine, which lost and tied versus Providence this weekend in Orono. The Black Bears are just 2-3-2 in their last seven games.
New Hampshire weighs in at No. 4 in both the poll and the PWR. The Wildcats also struggled this weekend against Northeastern, earning a slim 4-3 vistory before knotting a game at 1.
Another Hockey East team with trouble this weekend was No. 5 Boston College, which split a weekend series with Merrimack, including a stunning 6-1 Warrior win Saturday night. This comes on the heels of a 3-2 loss to No. 9 Boston University in the championship game of the Beanpot last Monday.
Continuing with disappointing weekends we have No. 7 North Dakota, which earned just one point in two games with No. 13 Denver. The Sioux are 4-5-3 since the start of 2003.
The only games between ranked opponents are a Friday and Saturday meeting between North Dakota and No. 12 MSU-Mankato. Other match-ups to watch are No. 9 Boston University against surging Providence in a home-and-home series, as well as No. 6 Minnesota sparring with in-state rival Minnesota-Duluth for a pair of games.
The USCHO.com Poll is compiled by U.S. College Hockey Online, and consists of 40 voters, including 28 coaches from the Division I conferences and 12 beat writers from across the country. The poll is published weekly by the Associated Press.
The PairWise Ranking is a system which attempts to mimic the method used by the NCAA Selection Committee to determine participants for the NCAA Division I men’s hockey tournament. The PWR compares teams with a Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) at or above .500, judging them by four criteria: record against common opponents, head to head competition, record against other teams with RPIs at or above .500, and the RPI.
The PWR can be reformatted and redistributed by any media outlet or person, provided USCHO’s URL (http://www.uscho.com/) accompanies the results.
