A year ago as college men's hockey teams closed their regular seasons and prepared for conference tournament play, Mike Hastings and Tom Serratore each had a good idea where their teams stood in terms of making the NCAA tournament.
Hastings' Minnesota State Mankato team was in line for a No. 1 NCAA regional seed, while Serratore's Bemidji State squad sat on the NCAA bubble for a spot in a national tournament that ultimately was scuttled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
And if Hastings and Serratore needed confirmation, they only had to consult the PairWise Ratings, the comparison formula the NCAA uses to pick and seed its 16-team tournament field.
This season, with COVID-19 prompting teams to largely play games within their conference, the PairWise has been rendered useless when trying to compare teams from different leagues. Instead, the NCAA Division I men's ice hockey committee will use some PairWise components to compare teams within conferences, but ultimately it will rely on subjectivity to fill the field.
Hastings had scheduled series against St. Cloud State and Minnesota Duluth, and the Mavericks were to play in the Ice Breaker tournament in Duluth that included UMD, the Gophers and Providence. All those, of course, were wiped out.
"I've got a tremendous amount of respect for our league because it beats you up, year-in and year-out, but the one thing you do get a taste of when you go outside the conference to play nonconference games, it gives you a little more of a barometer of where you're at," Hastings said. "We haven't been able to do that."
Serratore, whose team travels to Mankato for Thursday's opener of a home-and-home series, agreed with Hastings.
"It's tough for everybody because you don't know what you don't know right now," Serratore said. "All we know is our league this year. We have an idea about the teams outside our conference, but you don't know until you play them."
