Local teams make NCAA tourney, Gophers out after wild final weekend

Published Mar. 18, 2018 2:35 p.m. ET

No. 1 overall seed St. Cloud State, Minnesota State and Minnesota Duluth will all open the NCAA men's hockey tournament close to home.

All three teams were placed in the West Regional in Sioux Falls, South Dakota by the NCAA's selection committee. The 16-team field was unveiled Sunday.

SCSU is the regional's No. 1 seed, Minnesota State is a No. 2 seed and Minnesota Duluth is a No. 3 seed. Air Force rounds out the regional as a No. 4 seed.

The Huskies take on Air Force on Friday, March 23 at 3 p.m. UMD and Minnesota State square off at 6:30 p.m. The winners will play at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 24. The winner of the West Regional will face the winner of the Midwest Regional on April 5 in the Frozen Four at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The bracket reveal followed a dramatic final weekend of conference tournament play, as upsets across the nation knocked perennial powers Minnesota and North Dakota out of contention.

UMD edged the Gophers in the PairWise rankings -- which mimic the criteria used by the NCAA to determine the tournament field -- by .0001 in the Ratings Percentage Index.

All four No. 4 seeds were awarded to teams that would have finished outside tournament contention but earned an automatic bid by winning a conference postseason tournament, narrowing the field of at-large bids. The situation is a first for the 16-team tournament format, which dates back to 2003.

Princeton upset Clarkson in the ECAC championship game, while Boston University upended Providence to win the Hockey East tournament. Michigan Tech beat Northern Michigan in the WCHA championship game after knocking off Minnesota State during a best-of-three quarterfinal series. Atlantic Hockey's auto-bid went to Air Force, the conference's only representative.

Wins by Denver in the NCHC championship and Notre Dame in the Big Ten championship contributed to Minnesota's ouster. Both Princeton and Notre Dame won in overtime.

The wild finale ends a streak of 15 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances for North Dakota. The Gophers missed the tournament for the second time in the last three seasons following a string of four consecutive tournament appearances from 2012-15. Minnesota fell in a three-game Big Ten tournament quarterfinal series to Penn State, losing twice a week after losing back-to-back games to the Nittany Lions in their final regular-season series of the year.