Winter Break Edition of College Hockey Bracketology: Puck Drop

Winter Break has fully arrived in college hockey, with only a couple of regular-season games this week, and nearly nothing next week until we get into holiday tournaments after Christmas.

With the schedule being limited in mid-December, there wasn’t too much movement in the latest rankings, or the NPI (NCAA Percentage Index) which will be the primary metric for the selection committee in determining and seeding this season’s NCAA Tournament.

With that in mind, this Bracketology update will be abbreviated, but also one that will be often referred to as representing the conclusion to the first half of the 2025-26 season. So here goes, and if you need further explanation on anything try checking out last week’s edition.

It’s a 16-team field that will make up the 2026 Division I Men's Ice Hockey Championship, with the Frozen Four set to be played in Las Vegas on April 9-11.

The six conferences receive automatic bids. They’ll eventually be determined by the conference tournaments, but our purposes they’re represented by the current first-place team in the standings: Hockey East, ECAC Hockey, Big Ten, NCHC, CCHA and Atlantic Hockey (AHA): Dartmouth, Connecticut, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota State and Holy Cross.

The NPI rankings of our automatic qualifiers are No. 2, 18, 4, 3, 10, and 22. Only two of those teams had the same rank as a week ago.

We round out the field with 10 at-large bids, based on NPI: Michigan, Michigan State, Denver, Minnesota Duluth, Penn State, Harvard, Augustana, Western Michigan, Quinnipiac and finally Cornell.

Compared to a week ago, Northeastern is out, Quinnipiac is back in. As we noted in Tuesday’s Puck Drop, Hockey East would only have one team in the tournament, but look at the next three teams on the doorstep: Providence, Boston College and Northeastern, with New Hampshire lurking at No. 21 and Boston University at No. 23.

Seeding is next. The four regionals will be March 27-29, at Albany, N.Y., Sioux Falls, S.D., and Loveland, Colo., Worcester, Mass. Host teams are Union, Denver, Omaha and Holy Cross, respectively. As we group the teams, the * indicates the school is hosting so it must play at that site. Note that North Dakota is not the host venue in Sioux Falls (which is South Dakota), but is the host for the Frozen Four.

We're down to placing teams in the bracket, and pairings, which need to be geographically friendly when possible but avoid first-round conference matchups, and all in a way that doesn't negatively impact the bracket integrity.

About the only thing we don’t like about this week’s projection is having two Big Ten teams seeded first and second in the Albany Regional, but that is geographically friendly for Penn State.

Just like last week, a handful of results led to big changes in our bracket:

SEE ALSO: Last Week's Bracketology

Puck Drop: Wednesday, December 17, 2025

• Former Boston College goaltender Thatcher Demko made 23 saves for his first shutout this season, and the Vancouver Canucks won their second straight game since trading former Michigan defenseman Quinn Hughes, 3-0 against the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden. It was Demko's 10th shutout. Meanwhile, former UMass goaltender Jonathan Quick made 14 saves for the Rangers.