As is always going to be the case when it comes to any NCAA bracket selection, there were plenty of teams that had every right to be upset about where they ended up following Sunday night's selection of the 2026 NCAA Division I Field Hockey Championship teams.
Truth be told, that would inevitably be the case whether the tournament consisted of 18 teams or 68 teams.
Based on the 10 automatic qualifiers from the conference tournaments, and how highly rated six of the teams that failed to win their conference tournaments – Maryland, Harvard, Connecticut, Princeton, Iowa, and Duke – were expected to be, there were realistically two open spots in the 18-team tournament heading into the announcement of the selections.
With, of course, more than two teams vying for them.
Those two spots ultimately went to North Carolina and Massachusetts, with North Carolina even being one of the eight teams (and one of the six at-large teams, even ahead of Duke) awarded a seed.
Suffice it to say that not everybody was happy about it, and these four teams in particular have every right to be looking for answers about those highly questionable decisions.
1. Wake Forest Demon Deacons
I think I felt worse for Penn State than I felt for Wake Forest on Sunday night, but I probably felt angrier for the Demon Deacons after the complete and utter level of disrespect they were shown by the selection committee.
One of the reasons why Penn State was supposedly left out, which we'll get to more in a moment, was because, according to the selection show host, "unfortunately their RPI kind of caught up to them a little bit."
That's interesting. Because Wake Forest's RPI was 0.605, tied for ninth nationally. UNC's was 0.604. I'm not sure who this might help, but 0.605 is a greater number than 0.604.
And yes, Wake Forest beat UNC head-to-head in Chapel Hill, in addition to finishing the season with a better record. I guess RPI didn't matter here, or it would have "caught up" to UNC as well. Late-season performance is also supposed to matter to the committee, and that game happened literally just a week before the regular season ended.
For those who speculated that the committee (or should we say the UNCommittee?) would indeed use a different set of rules when it comes to the Tar Heels, congratulations; you win the prize.
Are we allowed to say we hope that prize is another Northwestern beatdown? That might very well be what they'll be hoping for in Winston-Salem. That is, if UNC can even beat Miami first.
2. Penn State Nittany Lions
We get it; if RPI were the be-all and end-all, Penn State still would have been on the outside looking in. Their RPI of 0.603 is 12th nationally, and thanks to the late "bid stealers", seven teams that ranked lower than the Nittany Lions in that particular metric earned automatic bids by winning their respective conference tournaments. That would have made Penn State the top team left out.
It's not so much the fact that they were left out, but the apparent reason why. UMass getting in is undoubtedly a feel-good story after they did not lose a game in regulation all season. But the assertion that the Nittany Lions were left out because of their RPI, while UMass, with their 0.601 RPI, got in instead sort of negates that whole argument that Penn State's RPI "caught up to them".
Quite frankly, I'm not even really sure it was chasing them down, after they earned four ranked wins (and an 8-1 overall record) in October alone, but there's very little I'm sure of after Selection Sunday at this point.
The selection committee does have plenty of tools to use other than RPI to make these calls, including "significant wins and losses".
But apparently Penn State's win over two-time reigning national champion and No. 1 Northwestern, which notably happened in the regular season finale, wasn't significant enough, whereas the committee saw fit to place very little weight, if any, on what turned out to be an extremely bad loss by UNC to a Michigan team that finished 6-10 and missed the Big Ten Tournament entirely with just one Big Ten win (over Michigan State, the conference's only winless team).
Penn State was also sneakily one of just two teams to beat Lafayette, which doesn't get a ton of respect out of a weaker Patriot League but still finished the season with a higher RPI than UMass and is headed to the tournament themselves with an auto bid. The only other team to do so? Northwestern.
3. Liberty Flames
We don't have much to say here other than the obvious, even if it apparently wasn't nearly as obvious to those actually making the decisions.
Liberty finished with a better record than North Carolina and beat them head-to-head as well, yet barely anybody is talking about them.
You might have never guessed that they actually had a tougher strength of schedule than both Wake Forest and Penn State, and their 0.599 RPI was close enough (within 0.006 points) to the four teams truly in the "bubble watch" category to justify an at-large selection.
But I guess this was just one of those cases where RPI was a convenient excuse not to let a team in.
4. Syracuse Orange
From a certain standpoint, Syracuse might actually have a case to feel more upset than any of the three teams on this list that failed to get in, even though they did get in themselves.
They finished with a better record than UNC, beat them in the ACC Tournament semifinals, and won the ACC Tournament Championship Game. They also had a higher RPI than the Tar Heels. But guess who was seeded No. 8, and guess who wasn't seeded at all?
UNC did beat Syracuse during the regular season, but given our discussion about Wake Forest's regular season win over UNC, we're not quite sure why that would mean much in this case when it didn't in that one. Yet apparently it did.
Syracuse being rated lower than UNC, despite all of the above, perhaps even demonstrated that they very well might not have made it in at all had they not beaten Boston College in the ACC title game to earn the ACC's auto bid, in which case they'd be right up there in the Wake Forest-level realm of rage.
The NCAA Tournament is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, November 11. A potential Northwestern vs. North Carolina rematch would be a quarterfinal game on Sunday, November 15. Live coverage of the opening round, the first round, and the quarterfinals is set to be provided by ESPN+. A full bracket and tournament schedule can be found on the NCAA's website.
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