What If? The 2022 NCAA Women’s Hockey Tournament Pairwise Predictor

*Be patient after making changes. It can take a few seconds for the sheet to recalculate.*

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For years, USCHO has provided a fantastic tool allowing you to plug in theoretical results of the men’s hockey conference tournaments and see its results on the Pairwise rankings. Unfortunately, a similar tool was never available for women’s hockey.

But as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. So here at BC Interruption, we built it ourselves. This is the seventh year of the BCI Women’s Pairwise Predictor, and version 7.0 carries over the same great features from past years while also reflecting the newly expanded 11-team NCAA Women’s Hockey Tournament.

The interface is pretty self-explanatory — just follow the instructions on the sheet. Starting with the NEWHA final weekend games on the bottom right, use the drop-down menus to select who you think will win each game, progress next to the conference quarterfinals, and then move across to the “Finals” and “Champion” columns.

You have two options for how to input results: You can either start fresh and input everything from scratch, or, you can select “Y” next to “Autofill Higher Seeds?” and it will fill every incomplete dropdown with the higher seeded team in that matchup, allowing you to tweak from there with fewer clicks. Just keep in mind that once you touch a field, it will no longer autofill, though everything else will correctly autofill based on what you selected in that field. When in doubt, if you want to start over or if things go wonky on you, just refresh the page.

The “Semis” column will auto-populate with matchups based on conference tournament re-seeding rules once you input the quarterfinals results, and the next round’s drop-downs will turn on once you complete the previous round’s selections. If you make a selection that’s not possible (for example, if you select BC winning in the “Finals” but then go back and make them lose in the “Semis”), the Predictor will inform you of the error and highlight the field(s) you need to fix.

As you input results, the box at the top right will update to show the resulting Pairwise Rankings. Be patient, as it can take a few seconds for the rankings to re-calculate. Once all results are entered, the 4 autobids will be added to the field. Again, the autobids will not update until all results are entered. The first two teams out will be provided as well, to see how close they were to making the field.

One last thing — yes, I know, LIU plays St. Michael’s on Monday and Tuesday in a pair of makeup games. Rather than putting myself through the ringer programming these for this one season, I just hard-coded them in as LIU wins. Sorry, Purple Knights. I’ll change this after the fact if LIU doesn’t sweep.

This year’s iteration of the predictor required wholesale changes thanks to the expanded tournament field, so it’s certainly possible that there could be some bugs. If you encounter any, or if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out either in the comments or by email at grant dot salzano at gmail dot com.