NCAA Tournament Field Set :Terriers face Denver in Saint Paul

The 16 team NCAA tournament field is now set after this past weekend's conference championship games and obviously the Boston University Terriers made the field for the second straight season. The Terriers will face the Denver Pioneers in the first round of the West Regional in St. Paul, Minnesota. The winner of that game faces the winner of #2 overall seed St. Cloud State and Ferris State who is the king of the garbage that is the WCHA. The Terriers first round game is at 6:30 pm on Saturday night on ESPNU as seen in the bracket below.

The Terriers definitely got a favorable draw by avoiding other conference teams in their regional as Hockey East is clearly the best conference in the country this year. Five other HE teams(BC, UML, PC, Notre Dame and Northeastern) made the NCAA tournament and will be beating up on each other in the other regionals. My pick for the Frozen Four is Yale, PC, Notre Dame, and BU.

Yesterday(when the bracket came out) is one of the most entertaining days of the year on social media as fans react to their placement in the field.  Quinnipiac/ECAC fans were complaining over being in Albany over Worcester which is like a 30 minute further drive for the team than Worcester. The committee obviously made that choice to bolster attendance in both regions. Worcester now has BC, PC, and Harvard while Albany has Quinnpiac, RIT, Yale and Lowell. It really isn't that hard of a concept to understand yet there were people whining about it like it will actually have an impact on the games themselves. Quinnipiac has one of the two easy first round opponents yet their fans are mad over driving an extra half hour and favoring the "big schools" like BC and PC. They obviously have never been to Worcester if they wanted to be placed there that badly. Albany isn't much better but atleast the first two rows of the rink didn't need to be cut out to fit the ice.