I've been remiss in my duties, so I offer my most profound apologies. I've been
feeling a bit ill. This year there are some interesting things happening for the
NCAA tournament. As a result of the 9/11 events, air travel is going to be
limited to only those cases where the drive would be >400 miles, and to make
sure the top 4 seeds get byes. These are potentially conflicting objectives,
and no one really knows what the committee will do. Also, there is still one
game left to be played, which complicates things. If Michigan State wins the
CCHA title game tonight, it's pretty straightforward. The main question would
be if Harvard or Quinnipiac would be the eastern team sent west. I assumed
Harvard, but that's little more than a guess.
If MSU wins today, my guess is that the brackets will look like this:
WEST
1. DU
2. MSU
3. SCSU
4. CC
5. Michigan
6. Harvard

EAST
1. UNH
2. Minnesota
3. BU
4. Maine
5. Cornell
6. Quinnipiac

In that case, CC would play Michigan (on Michigan's home ice!), then face Denver
the next day. Tough road...

Things get very, very complicated if Michigan wins the CCHA game today. BU is
the host of the eastern regional, so they must stay east. However, that would
force the #1 seed (UNH) to travel west, and either Minnesota or DU to travel
east if they were to leave the possibility of the 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 matchups.
Due to the travel restrictions, I'm assuming they won't let that happen. So,
assuming the travel restriction takes precedence over 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3
(likely), we have:
WEST
1. DU
2. Minnesota

EAST
1. UNH
2. BU

Now it gets complicated again. In order to minimize travel, CC, SCSU, Michigan,
and MSU would all be in the west regional, and Cornell, Quinnipiac, Harvard, and
Maine would be in the East. That would be a horribly, horribly unbalanced
bracket. You would have, IMHO, 6 of the top 8 teams in the country in the west,
and unquestionably the 3 weakest teams in the east. I hope the committee would
not let that happen just to keep one team from flying, but they might. My hope
would be that they would fly one eastern team (Harvard again) west, and since CC
will be flying regardless, have the Tigers fly east. There are too many
possibilities to go into once I start speculating like this, and I just don't
have a good understanding of what the priorities of the committee would be at
this point. I'm confident that the top 2 seeds in each region would look like I
put above. I can, however, imagine them making a western bracket of horror and
eastern cakewalk bracket (travel = #1 priority) or swap CC/Harvard
(travel/balance equally) or swap SCSU and CC with Quinnipiac and Harvard
(bracket balance #1 priority).

If you want to play around with the possibilities, check out this site:

http://www.slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?tourney.diy