With their far superior three-week playoff format, the CCHA will play the final weekend of their regular season this coming weekend. Ferris State has already clinched at least a share of the regular season conference title, but all but the last two playoff positions are still up for grabs.

Here's what the current standings look like.

The CCHA put out a release breaking down their tiebreaking procedures. Tiebreaker F is a coin flip. Personally, I'd bump coin flip up to least Tiebreaker D, mainly because I have no clue what "comparison of the winning percentages of the co-champions against the remaining highest ranked CCHA teams, successively, until the determination is accomplished or all CCHA regular-season contests have been considered" means.

Here's where each team stands heading into the weekend.

Ferris State- As I said, the Bulldogs have clinched at least a share of the conference championship. Michigan can still tie them in the standings if Ferris State takes 0 of 6 points against Western Michigan, and Michigan takes 6 of 6 points against Bowling Green. Ferris State and Michigan have identical shootout records, so the deciding tiebreaker would be Michigan's 2-0 record against Ferris State in the regular season.

Michigan- As stated above, if Michigan takes all six points against Bowling Green while Ferris State takes no points, the Wolverines can still earn a share of the regular season championship and the first overall seed. On the other end of the spectrum, Western Michigan, Michigan State, and Miami could all pass Michigan this weekend, theoretically pushing Michigan to 5th, meaning the Wolverines would not host a home playoff series. Sixth place Lake Superior could tie Michigan in the standings, but the Wolverines would hold the tiebreaker over the Lakers.

Western Michigan- The Broncos are two points behind Michigan for the second spot, which is as high as the Broncos can go. The lowest the Broncos could finish is sixth. Seventh place Ohio State could finish tied with Western Michigan, and would win the tiebreaker, but that would mean Miami would finish in the 7th place slot. Four points against Ferris State would guarantee a top four finish for Western Michigan.

Michigan State- Michigan State can climb all the way to 2nd with two wins and a combination of Michigan taking two or fewer points, and Western Michigan taking five or fewer points against Ferris State. Three points for Michigan State guarantees they won't have to play in the first round of the playoffs. Five points guarantees that they will be at home in the second round.

Miami- Miami can get all the way to second place with six points and one or fewer by Michigan. Northern Michigan can't catch Miami due to tiebreakers, meaning, at worst, Miami will be at home in the first round of the playoffs.

Lake Superior-Lake Superior can reach as high as third place in the league. One point keeps them out of ninth place and on the road in the first round of the playoffs. They need to gain at least four points on Michigan State to have a chance at finishing in the top four.

Ohio State-Three points won or three points lost by Northern Michigan or Notre Dame keeps Ohio State out of the bottom three and not playing on the road in the first round of the playoffs. The Buckeyes can reach a tie for third in the standings, and as a plus, controls their destiny against one of the teams ahead of them in Miami.

Notre Dame-The Irish will have to play in the first round of the playoffs, as they cannot reach the top five. They could tie 5th place Miami, but that would mean Ohio State would leapfrog over both of them. They have to finish equal to or better than Northern Michigan in the final weekend to avoid going on the road in the first round of the playoffs.

Northern Michigan- The Wildcats are in a tough spot because with so many ties and shootout wins, they lose just about every tiebreaker. They need to earn more points than Notre Dame this weekend to host a playoff series in the first round.

Alaska- The Nanooks are locked into 10th place and will play Alaska-Anchorage in a non-conference series. Two wins would be huge for the league because it would likely put Alaska back on the right side of the TUC Cliff.

Bowling Green- The Falcons are locked into 11th place.

SB Nation's Nebraska site Corn Nation picked up on a story where Minnesota head coach Don Lucia said hockey seemed like a natural fit at the University of Nebraska, and they look at the possibility. First, it's important to note that there's really no new information here; just Lucia saying he thinks it would be good idea, which is correct. If done correctly, Lincoln could be a great college hockey town, in much the same way Omaha is. But I would still be very surprised if Division I hockey happens there, at least with the current administration. Husker football will always be king, and I don't think the university has any intentions of adding another sport to compete with it. And while it was never officially made public, it was pretty clear two years ago that Nebraska-Omaha got to become the state's "hockey school" in exchange for dropping their football program, thus freeing up however many in-state players to walk-on at Nebraska-Lincoln rather than go elsewhere to play football.

Even in the internet age, a good copy editor can sometimes make all the difference. Take for example this story in the Duluth News-Tribune about UMD's student once again saying ridiculously offensive things:

Nielson said the university is working to find leaders in the student section who can help direct things in a positive direction. He said the school is not seeking out the students responsible for the chants.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Student fans were warned in 2009 about offensive chants after a game against Minnesota State-Mankato when they were heard shouting an anti-homosexual slur and a vulgar insult.

After that incident, Nielson sent a letter threatening to remove students from games and revoke their season tickets.

There's an entire one paragraph between Bob Nielson saying they're not going to do anything to students who chanted horrible things in 2011 and Bob Nielson saying they were going to be serious about students who chant horrible things in 2009.

In discussing the Paul Kelly fiasco, Chris Peters points out that the college commissioners don't have that much power to begin with, because, what is it they really do to earn their paycheck? Can the conference commissioners fire him too?

Nate Ewell will be taking over for Paul Kelly as interim executive director for College Hockey Inc. Ewell has been pretty active with CHI so hopefully he can be successful, but the image of the institution took a big hit this week.

College Hockey Prospective has a great look at Tier II hockey in Ontario and the effect it has on NCAA hockey.

The Minnesota State High School playoffs kicked off in full last night. The early round of sectionals are usually mostly blowouts, with the real action not really coming until next week's section finals. There was one pretty big upset last night, when Forest Lake knocked off Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids was one of only three teams to come within one goal of Duluth East all season, so seeing Grand Rapids go out opens up the Greyhounds trip to state. The loss also means that Minnesota recruit and NHL draft prospect Jake Bischoff would be available to play in the USHL as soon as this weekend, giving him a more ample opportunity to be scouted against quality competition.

Also in the bottom half of Duluth East's bracket, goalie Chase Perry of #2 seed Andover, who has made an extremely strong case for an invite to play for the NTDP next year, appeared to injure his knee last night. After the game, Perry just posted the hashtag #frick on his Twitter account, so you can draw your own conclusions.

This list of the Top Ten Defensemen in the NCAA does a good listing the top three defensemen playing in the NCAA.

OHL expert Brock Otten looks at some players aging out of the OHL and facing the decision of whether they want to get an education or play professional hockey. Three of the kids mentioned--Michael Catenacci, Beau Schmitz, and Andy Bathgate, and others like Daniel Erlich that didn't even merit mention--could have done both if they hadn't given up their NCAA commitments.

In what came as a shocking announcement yesterday, Paul Kelly abruptly announced that he was resigning as the head of College Hockey Inc.. Details of the resignation slowly emerged, in that Kelly was given an ultimatum by his bosses, the Hockey Commissioners Association, to either resign or be fired. The reasons for the split have only been rumored, but all signs point to the issue being a distrust between the commissioners and Kelly, and for Kelly trying to do more than what the commissioners wanted, because it would have limited their power.

It's hard to imagine Kelly finding a more foolish and incompetent group than the circa-2009 NHL Players Union, but he did in the Hockey Commissioners Association. In hindsight, Kelly's tenure seemed doomed from the start. He was brought in by the commissioners to do a job selling the sport that the commissioners were either too lazy or too stupid to do. He was brought in to change the status quo, by a group of people who thought the status quo was working out just fine for them. And that is college hockey's biggest problem: the people in charge of the sport have done a tremendous job convincing themselves how important they are, but a terrible job of convincing anyone else of that fact.

Not to mention that Kelly was handcuffed in how he could sell the sport much of this summer due to college hockey's realignment. Unfortunately, he didn't have the ability to walk away from Bruce McLeod's incompetence and do his own thing the same way that 75% of the teams in Bruce McLeod's league did. Still, Kelly made significant gains in terms of the visibility of college hockey, especially north of the border, and probably did more in two years than the rest of college hockey's leadership had ever done prior to his tenure.

And now, all of the work done by Kelly is basically discredited and undone. Headlines were already going up around Canadian hockey circles yesterday that "Kelly Told to Either Resign or Be Fired". It completely ruined a noble initiative in College Hockey Inc. over a petty power squabble. The commissioner's have said they will rehire someone to run the operation, though the position will likely be different--read: toothless--in nature. I can't imagine who would be foolish enough to take that gig.

WCHA commissioner-for-now Bruce McLeod "discussed" Kyle Rau's one game suspension for hitting Jason Zucker in the absolute most Bruce McLeod way possible, meaning he talked at length about boring, stupid things no one cares about, and refused to give any real information on pertinent issues. Your money quote:

“We decided in the Zucker-Rau incident, after looking at all the factors involved, that there were enough other circumstances involved,” said McLeod, who didn’t specify said circumstances.

It's been another rough season for Alaska-Anchorage. Last weekend, the last place Seawolves took on the team directly above them in the standings in Minnesota State in their last real shot at moving out of the cellar of the WCHA. Despite only allowing 17 shots on Friday and just 16 shots on Saturday, the Seawolves still lost both games. Here is the Anchorage Daily News description of the two game-winning goals that Anchorage allowed:

Friday:

"Sproule just tried to whack it away but unfortunately it just caught someone," said Gunderson, who didn't see the puck after the ricochet. "Their guy (Louwerse) and (UAA defenseman) Austin Coldwell were tied up in front of the net. ... It must have gone off Coldwell."

Louwerse was credited with his second goal of the night -- he had just one in 22 previous games -- but said he didn't touch the puck.

"It ended up hitting one of (Sproule's) teammates' legs and bounced back in the net," Louwerse said.

Saturday:

"I was hoping that it was ending up in the corner or behind the net," Gunderson said about the play where he tried to poke the puck away from Minnesota State's Michael Dorr. "And sure enough it hit me in the back and rolled in the net."

Yikes. Those are two pretty painful ways to lose.

Here's a few other notes of sadness relating to Alaska-Anchorage:

-With 9 league points and only four games remaining, it's all but guaranteed that they will finish in last place this year. They can finish tied with Minnesota State if they win all four of their final games, and Minnesota State loses their final four. They're seven points behind 11th place Wisconsin, and the Badgers have an extra two games in hand on UAA.

-At 52nd overall in the RPI, #53 Vermont is the only major conference team rated below them.

-The two losses also dropped their overall record to a dismal 7-19-2 on the season. Assuming Anchorage doesn't win their remaining four regular season games, sweep the first round of the WCHA playoffs, win three games at the Final Five, and go on to win the national title--and I feel pretty confident in that assumption--this will mark the 18th consecutive season, every season that UAA has been a part of the WCHA, in which they will finish with a losing overall record.

-The goaltending duo of Rob Gunderson and Chris Kamal have save percentages of .877 and .866 respectively. The last time a goalie from Alaska-Anchorage had a save percentage better than .900 for the season was sophomore Nathan Lawson in 2005-2006 with a .908 save percentage.

-Anchorage's leading scorer so far this year is Mitch Bruijsten with 16 points. His 16 points would only crack the top 5 leading scorers on one WCHA team(North Dakota, strangely enough).

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that as of today, the NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Tournament Committee is officially considering the following teams for their postseason tournament:

Northeastern: 11-14-3, tied for 8th in Hockey East, 30th out of 59 in RPI.

Alaska: 11-15-4, 10th place in CCHA, 31st out of 59 in RPI

Providence: 12-14-2, tied for 8th in Hockey East, 32nd out of 59 in RPI

Those are not NCAA tournament teams. I could figure that out without the help of the calculator.

Defenders of the Pairwise system will say that we're not at the end of the season, and that it's only a terrible math system one day per year, instead of a terrible math system every day of the year. It's true that the bottom end of the TUC Cliff will look different on Selection Sunday, but it won't look that different. Out of the grouping of Northeastern, Alaska, Providence, Massachusetts, RIT, Wisconsin and Michigan Tech, about half will end on the right side of the "Under Consideration" and the other half won't, and it will be those literally-below-average teams that end up determining the final makeup of the NCAA tournament..

When the PWR system was first devised by the NCAA tournament committee, the only teams they looked at were the four or five teams around the bubble for the last couple at-large bids. Everybody else was clearly in the tournament, or clearly out of the tournament. As the general public tried to reverse-engineer the process used by the committee, they came up with the formula that is currently used today. The number of teams "under consideration" was raised to any team with an RPI over .500, then to the top 25 teams in the RPI for a while, and now back to any team with an RPI over .500. This year is especially bad because with no really great teams at the top, and a few very bad teams at the bottom, the number of teams with a +.500 RPI is an unwieldy 30-ish teams.

Having more teams than necessary under consideration creates two problems. The first problem is that comparing a top team like Ferris State or even a bubble team like Ohio State or North Dakota to a team so significantly behind them in the RPI like Alaska or Providence is that it can only produce two types of information: information that is useless, or information that is flat-out incorrect. There's no point to comparing teams with such a wide disparity in RPI because we already know which team is better. The Pairwise system was created to help adjust small flaws in the RPI, not completely override it. All including those clearly-not-in-the-tournament teams does is create the possibility of a legitimate contender losing a comparison based on some flukey coincidences to a team they are clearly better than. So far, this year's table looks pretty good in terms of outlying comparisons, but there is still that possibility.

The second problem is that the current system completely devalues the purpose of comparing the records of "teams under consideration". As it stands now, a game against Ferris State or Boston College counts the exact same as a game against Alaska or Providence, even though it is quite there is a wide gap in quality between those two teams.

So what are the solutions to this? The simple solution is to go back to a hard cap of teams under consideration. I'd set the cap at 20 teams. It's still not a perfect system. No matter where you draw the line, there is still going to the major issue of the TUC Cliff with this system. At least with only 20 teams, all the teams included have at least a reasonable claim to being considered for the tournament, and the last team to be a TUC likely wouldn't be that far in terms of RPI from the 14th or 15th team in the RPI, eliminating the possibility of a crazy outlying comparison changing the tournament field.

The other, better, but also more complicated solution involves using the individual comparison categories as a way of adjusting RPIs to determine comparisons. For example, let's take one of the current tables more outlying comparisons between RPI #8 Michigan State and RPI #18 Notre Dame. Michigan State holds a fairly decisive .5436 to .5324 RPI advantage, but Notre Dame leads in TUC (12-12-3 to 11-12-4) and Common Opponents (.5972 to .5333) to win the comparison 2 to 1. A modified RPI system would say MSU has a 2.5 game advantage in terms of RPI(this is a rough estimate, and would be calculated as a percentage). Notre Dame has a half game advantage in TUC and one game advantage in common opponents. Add that up and MSU would still win the comparison with a one-game advantage in RPI.

This system eliminates the possibility of a solid advantage in RPI being outweighed by two miniscule advantages in the other comparison categories. Again, there's still the issue of which teams count in the TUC category of the comparison, but that will almost always be the case. It also has the disadvantage of making the math involved virtually impossible for the average fan to calculate or even understand. But ultimately, if the math is better, that's probably the way they should go.

A Googling public has spoken. Lots of people seem interested in the soon-to-be-viral video of Detroit Lakes senior forward Alex Mason scoring a ridiculous shorthanded breakaway goal. That's a fantastic play, and something I've never really seen before. That goal was one of two goals scored by Mason in Detroit Lakes 5-1 win over Bagley/Fosston on February 10th. He followed that up with 2 goals and 3 assists the following night in a 5-1 win over Northern Lakes.

Mason is an interesting story. He's a Native American from the White Earth Indian Reservation, but chose to go to school at Detroit Lakes to help his hockey career. Mason currently leads Detroit Lakes' team with 14 goals and 23 assists for 37 points in 24 games. He appears to have junior hockey aspirations after this year, and plays like that should help get his name out there.

Michigan State came back from a 2-0 deficit to beat Michigan 3-2 thanks to 2 goals and an assist from defenseman Torey Krug. Krug was outstanding in this game. He's without a doubt an all-CCHA defenseman, and a case could be made for him being an all-American. Also of note, MSU held a skills competition this past week, and Krug put up some crazy numbers in the hardest shot competition. He's got tremendous power for such a small player.

Both of the nationally televised WCHA games drew some attention, and not for good reasons. North Dakota won the game 3-1, while Duluth picked up two major penalties in the game. The first one looked pretty legit as Joe Basaraba flung a North Dakota player pretty dangerously into the boards. I didn't see the second, a hit from behind by JT Brown, but all reports were that that one was even worse.

Meanwhile, a 5-3 Denver win was marred by a pretty ugly hit by Kyle Rau that knocked Jason Zucker out of the game. It's up for debate if Rau caught him too high or too late. He probably did, but I don't know if that hit requires any supplemental discipline.

I hate to say it, but my first two thoughts after watching that live were: I;m very glad Zucker is moving his limbs, and I'm glad Zucker is no longer moving his mouth. This is basically the 2011 World Juniors all over again for Zucker, where Zucker took a cheap shot from a Slovakian player because he couldn't keep his mouth shut and was worthless to his team the rest of the tournament because of it. If Zucker wants to act like that out on the ice, he's going to continue to pay the price for it. If 5'7" guys like Rau are doing that to Zucker now, he's in for a lot of trouble when he gets to the next level.

Bemidji had a very nice 3-2 win over Colorado College on their home ice. Bemidji was able to take a one goal midway through the third period and then gave CC absolutely nothing in the final ten minutes. The Tigers didn't even come close to threatening.

Western Michigan beat Ohio State in overtime. The Buckeyes were once the leaders in the CCHA, but have gone winless in 11 tries since the start of the new year, and now sit in a threeway for 6th in the CCHA, but with the most games played of the three, so essentially in 8th.

Lake Superior beat Alaska in Fairbanks by a score of 4-2. The win jumped LSSU from 8th place in the CCHA all the way up to a tie for third with Michigan and Michigan State. It's been that kind of year in the CCHA.