Unlike in college basketball, the method for selecting the NCAA hockey tournament field is strictly mathematical. They use a system called the pairwise rankings, which takes into account various things and ultimately ranks division 1 college teams.
The system has it's problems, however. Chris Dilks at SBN's Western College Hockey Blog says that flaws in the system helped out Alaska, the final at-large team in the tournament, while hurting Minnesota-Duluth.
First up is Alaska, since that's a fairly simple one. Alaska would have lost a comparison against Massachusetts, for some dubious reasons, if UMass had been a team under consideration, . One fewer comparison win would have dropped Alaska to 10 total comparison wins and into a tie with Ferris State and Michigan State for the last at-large bid. Ferris State had the highest RPI of the three and likely would have gotten the bid. As luck would have it for the Nanooks, UMass finished 26th in the RPI instead of 25th. Not that any of this was Alaska's fault. It would have been a joke if they missed out on the tournament because of that ridiculous comparison.
That brings us to Minnesota-Duluth. I think they're the real victim here. Adam Wodon probably does a better job of explaining this, in that old article about the travesty that kept Minnesota State out of the 2008 tournament, but the same situation applies here. Basically, the history is that about 8-10 years ago, the committee didn't necessarily look at the standings of who won the most comparisons like they currently do, so much as they just looked at the group of teams that was actually under consideration for the tournament and how they did against each other. If that were still the case, I think Minnesota-Duluth makes the tournament.
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