Face Off Tackle Empire // Holiday Tournament Recaps

Holiday Review

I didn't have a whole lot of time to watch the holiday tournaments with end of year work deadlines so I'll just run through the results for each team.  Overall, it was a good set of tournaments for B1G teams with OSU scoring two big upsets over No. 7 BC and No. 9 Cornell en route to the Florida College Classic Championship.  Those wins should help the B1G in the PairWise at the end of the year.  No. 14 Penn State finished third in the Three Rivers Classic, losing to Robert Morris and beating Clarkson.  No. 8 Michigan won the Great Lakes invitational with wins over Northern Michigan and Michigan Tech. Michigan State finished last in the same tournament with OT losses to both Tech and Northern.  MSU lost all three games against Tech this season while leading in the final minute or two of regulation.  Wisconsin won an exhibition against Trinity Western 1-0.  Minnesota finished second in the Mariucci Classic beating Connecticut but losing in OT to No. 5 Harvard.  No. 6 Nebraska Omaha also beat Trinity Western 6-0 in an exhibition.

Conference Standings

An overtime loss counts as a loss and no points are earned. If both teams are tied after the five minute OT period, the game goes down as a tie and both teams earn a point. A shootout follows a tie with the winner earning a second point. A shootout "win" counts as a tie, not a win in the standings and for NCAA Tournament seeding purposes. Total wins are used as the primary tie-breaker.  If teams have the same number of wins, head to head record is used.

KRACH Ratings, KRACH Rank, Pairwise Rank

Update on 1/4/2016 @ 1 PM EST

There are 60 teams in college hockey. The pairwise is an approximation of the selection process for the NCAA tournament (click link for explanation). The top 16 teams are selected for the tourney. Conference tournament champions get auto-bids so teams rated near 16 can be displaced if a lower ranked team wins it's conference tournament.

Points, Elimination numbers, KRACH Projections, and Last Years Points

Change in expected conference wins:

MN +2.31
MI +2.55
PSU -3.56
WI -2.03
MSU -6.27
OSU +7.00

I expect the volatility to greatly decrease once we get to February.  We are still early enough in the season where KRACH will have wild swings due to lack of games played.  Once you can draw a path connecting all teams, the numbers stabilize. The elimination numbers are a bit wonky due to Penn State playing two less games than everyone but having the highest max points.  I'll look into my spreadsheet after work slows down this week.

Conference Table

Points earned by team on the left are shown in the boxes

Green boxes mean that the team in the row is ahead of the team in the column. Red means the team in the column is ahead. Blue means the teams have split points. Once a season series is completed, the color will be darker, the points will be bold, and the box will have a thicker border. Column on the right shows the points gained by a team. Row on the bottom shows the points lost by a team.

KRACH Projection Review