Unlike college football, college hockey manages to have a simple, fair, effective method for selecting their NCAA tournament that takes subjectivity out of the process and treats everyone fairly - and generally yields very few complaints.
Whether you are a big brand like BC or BU, an upstart like Stonehill, or a team that hasn’t won a tournament game since the Reagan administration like Northeastern, everyone is treated the same and knows exactly what they have to do to make the tournament.
While nobody considers college hockey’s Pairwise rankings perfect, it’s hard to argue that it’s not a better system than what we get from most college sports, made particularly acute when we see the giant endless pointless arguments over the last spots, and the common bias toward the biggest brands in sports like football and basketball (though surprisingly SMU did not get screwed over in this instance).