Michigan’s hockey team is slated to miss the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2019. If the selection committee continues its recent trend by strictly following the Pairwise rankings, a statistical model that weighs each team’s success and strength of schedule, to determine the 16-team of the NCAA Tournament, the Wolverines (18-15-3) will be on the outside looking in on Selection Sunday. They currently rank No. 14 in the Pairwise, but three teams behind them will earn automatic bids into the NCAA Tournament as conference champions. By being swept at home by No. 5 seed Penn State in the best-of-three Big Ten quarterfinals, Michigan’s tournament chances plummeted. It needed help in other conference tournaments to get in but received an unfavorable outcome Friday night. Michigan needed Quinnipiac to win the Eastern College Athletic Conference, but the top-seeded Bobcats were upset by Cornell 3-2 in overtime in the conference semifinals. Quinnipiac led 2-1 late before Cornell forced overtime with a shorthanded goal with 1:39 remaining. Michigan’s streak of reaching three straight Frozen Fours will come to an end after an inconsistent 2024-25 season. It lost five of its top six scorers from last year, including a late departure from first-round pick Rutger McGroarty just over a month before the season. The talented forward, who had 16 goals and 52 points in 36 games as a sophomore in 2023-24, had his rights traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins in August and turned pro. The team had several other high draft picks sign pro deals instead of returning. It didn’t feature the level of high-end NHL talent as in recent years but jumped out to a fast start this season. It began the year 9-2-1 but didn’t win more than two consecutive games since. The Wolverines also had two players leave the team midseason – graduate transfer defenseman Tim Lovell and freshman forward Christian Humphreys. Nevertheless, they were in a strong position to reach the tournament for a fifth straight year entering the postseason. They had an 85% chance of reaching when the Big Ten Tournament playoffs began, but two home losses to the Nittany Lions, who also were on the bubble, hurt their outlook. Third-year head coach Brandon Naurato said after their game two loss to PSU that he doesn’t expect Michigan to have a similar-type season anytime soon. “I’ll tell you what – we’ll see what our fate is the next two weeks – (but) Michigan will never be in this spot again,” he said. “Ever, ever, ever, ever as long as I’m here. We know the core of it (why the team is on the bubble). It’ll never happen again.”