Earlier this week, I asked the captain of the Wisconsin men's hockey team, defenseman Davis Drewiske, if he thought the team deserved to be in the NCAA Tournament.
The way he answered, you would have thought I was questioning the team's ability to skate. Like he had been fed a pass for a one-timer on net, he shot right back with this firm response:
Oh, absolutely.""
But things were never quite that certain for the Badgers, who - let's face the facts - had a losing record in the regular and post season.
Here's how Drewiske responds to that: ""The PairWise is the formula used for picking the teams. We're 12th in the PairWise. There's no reason why we shouldn't be in the tournament.""
PairWhat?
It's a system that basically models the methods of the NCAA Selection Committee, which let the world know Sunday that Wisconsin was among the 16 teams qualified for a run at the Frozen Four.
Unlike the other bracket field that gets all the attention plus some more, the college hockey one is regarded as being sorted out by less subjective means. That's why the Badgers were confident that they'd be one of the four teams fighting for their lives at the Kohl Center this weekend.
Someone outside the heady world of Badger fandom could and probably has raised the question of why Minnesota State - a team with a better record, a better poll standing, and a season series win over Wisconsin - did not beat out UW.
The answer to that question is that Wisconsin had more ""comparison wins"" than Minnesota State. The 25 teams with the best Ratings Percentage Index in the country are stacked up against one another and then given a point for each of those wins.
A comparison win is judged on four criteria: RPI (complicated in and of itself), head-to-head competition, record against common opponents and record against the other top-25 teams.
In the comparison between Minnesota State and the Badgers, the Mavericks won on the strength of their RPI, record against common foes and their record against Wisconsin this year.
Yet, the Badgers edged them out in comparison points, 11-10. You can point to so-called ""wins"" over Princeton and Northern Michigan - wins that the Mavericks did not register - as the reason why the Badgers are moving on.
As a bubble team, the Badgers quickly figured out that the road out of the regional bracket and toward Denver isn't an easy one. But to hear them tell it, they'd rather have to go through two WCHA teams than an unknown quantity. Remember, this isn't the UW team from two years ago that ran the gauntlet all the way to a college hockey championship.
Rather, it's the third-youngest group this season to make it this far. Only nine players were on the roster for the last NCAA Tournament appearance. Only four played.
Junior Ben Street, who scored against Maine in 2006 to help put the Badgers into the championship game, was asked what wisdom the four could impart on less-experienced teammates.
""We just tell them,"" he said, ""you don't get to play the second day if you don't play well the first day.""
If you agree that Wisconsin is strong enough to hold its own against the best teams in the country, e-mail Jon at bortin@wisc.edu.
