Some uncertainty apparently still persists around the NCAA’s new tournament selection criteria for men’s hockey.

CollegeHockeyNews unveiled its first Pairwise Rankings for the season (CHN PWR), and their implementation is a bit different from USCHO’s (USCHO PWR).

The differences aren’t just discrepancies in the underlying game data (e.g. neutral ice vs. not), but instead seem to be modest differences in the way the game weights are applied. CHN acknowledged that:

“But while the committee was transparent in how the weightings and Bonus were supposed to be done in general, it didn’t completely explain how the numbers were supposed to be applied against the existing RPI. There are different ways to do it.

Therefore, different sites are showing slightly different results. And we’ve been fielding constant questions as to why ours doesn’t match what’s being shown elsewhere.”

This PWR on this site has mimicked what USCHO has been publishing, though I’ll certainly keep an eye on developments.

Hopefully people in the know can help everyone converge on a common understanding of the new criteria, or there could be some surprises come tournament time for the first time in many years!