Field Hockey Bracketology

With 10 of the 11 NCAA field hockey conference beginning their tournaments this weekend in preparation to hand out league titles and continue on to the NCAA tournament, we here at TigerBlog have taken our best guess at NCAA Field Hockey bracketology for this year's tournament. Remember this is just a shot in the dark, but we had fun writing it and hopefully you'll have fun reading it.

We start with the projected automatic bids and play-in game winners. We didn't predict any upsets with the top seeds taking each conference tournament and the home teams winning the play-in games.

Projected Automatics Bids
ACC: Maryland
America East: Albany
Big East: Connecticut
Big 10: Penn State
CAA: James Madison

Projected Play-In Games and Winners
American (Patriot) over Lock Haven (NEC)
Princeton (Ivy) over California (NorPac) - hey, it's our blog; we can hope for the best
Massachusetts (A10) over Kent State (MAC)

So we now have eight teams in the tournament and need eight more. We will pick up the next best eight teams from the RPI. They, in order, are Wake Forest, Syracuse, North Carolina, Duke, Iowa, Michigan State, Virginia and Louisville.

We now have a field of 16 teams and we will seed them from 1-16 by RPI and pair the 1 and 16 seeds, 2-15, 3-14 and so on. This gives us the following bracket. By the way, the sites are guesses. Only the NCAA knows what schools have submitted to host regionals.

Regional 1 (at Maryland)
No. 1 Maryland vs. No. 16 Albany
No. 8 Princeton vs. No. 9 Penn State

Regional 2 (at Wake)
No. 2 Wake Forest vs. No. 15 Massachusetts
No. 7 Duke vs. No. 10 Iowa

Regional 3 (at Syracuse for now)
No. 3 Syracuse vs. No. 14 American
No. 6 North Carolina vs. No. 11 Michigan State

Regional 4 (at JMU)
No. 4 James Madison vs. No. 13 Louisville
No. 5 Connecticut vs. No. 12 Virginia

This gives us a perfect bracket in terms of ranking, but we must remember that the NCAA also takes region and travel into account when placing teams in regionals. At the same time, we do not want to ruin the bands of seeding. For example, the top four teams must be 1 seeds. It is not fair to move them down to a 2 seed for travel purposes. Likewise it is not fair to take a bottom-four ranked team and make them a 3 seed in a region.

For travel purposes and to avoid two league teams playing in the first round, we will adjust the bracket.

Regional 1 (at Maryland)
No. 1 Maryland vs. No. 15 Massachusetts
No. 8 Princeton vs. No. 9 Penn State

Regional 2 (at Wake)
No. 2 Wake Forest vs. No. 14 American
No. 7 Duke vs. No. 10 Iowa

Regional 3 (now at UConn)
No. 3 Syracuse vs. No. 16 Albany
No. 5 Connecticut vs. No. 11 Michigan State

Regional 4 (at JMU)
No. 4 James Madison vs. No. 13 Virginia
No. 6 North Carolina vs. No. 12 Louisville

So that's our bracket. Of course there are a lot of games to be played between now and next Tuersday evening when the seedings are announced. We'll post an update on Monday following the completion of conference tournaments on Sunday.