The 18-team 2026 NCAA Division I Field Hockey Championship bracket was confirmed on Sunday evening, and despite beating the No. 1 team in the country and two-time reigning national champions in late October and finishing the season No. 12 in RPI, the Penn State Nittany Lions were left out of the tournament for the fourth consecutive season.
Penn State was one of the teams on "bubble watch", fighting for what appeared to be two realistically open spots, and their path to an extended postseason got a lot tougher when Old Dominion upset Connecticut on Sunday afternoon in the Big East Championship game.
UConn was going to be in regardless, and for good reason, but Old Dominion had no path of getting in as an at-large team. Instead, they clinched one of the 10 automatic bids, and UConn effectively moved the cut line up a spot on the bubble by being all but guaranteed one of the at-large spots.
It had already gotten tougher after Miami beat Massachusetts on Saturday in the MAC Championship game, for a similar reason.
After a 12-6 season, Penn State ultimately missed out. Heading into the selection show, it looked as though they'd be competing with North Carolina, which entered Selection Sunday with a 12-7 record but a higher strength of schedule, Wake Forest, which entered Selection Sunday with a 13-6 record and a nearly identical resume to Penn State, despite a slightly lower strength of schedule, and UMass, which finished 18-2 without a regulation loss all season, despite a lower strength of schedule.
Penn State narrowly misses NCAA Tournament
Aside from the two aforementioned upsets, there were several individual moments that obviously could have changed Penn State's fate.
The Nittany Lions were the first team mentioned on the selection show when discussing teams that weren't selected, explaining that some 3 and 4 seeds winning their conference tournaments ultimately did them in.
— Brady Welsh (@bradywelsh06) November 9, 2026
Just look at how narrow the RPI (25% win percentage, 50% opponents' win percentage, 25% opponents' opponents' win percentage) margins were; Wake Forest was 0.605, UNC was 0.604, Penn State was 0.603, Massachusetts was 0.601, and Liberty was 0.599.
Flip any of Penn State's six losses, all to ranked teams, and the Nittany Lions probably get in based on the change to their own record alone. It was always going to be close, and unfortunately Penn State simply ended up on the wrong end of the fact that there were not enough at-large spots up for grabs following the conference tournaments. They were ultimately the team with the second-highest RPI among teams that were not selected, as Wake Forest also missed out.
In any kind of postseason selection, there will always be a team that's the "first team out", and there will always be a handful of teams that feel they deserved the chance to get to compete, whether the tournament consists of 18 teams or 68 teams.
When the College Football Playoff inevitably expands to 72 teams at some point within the next decade or so, there will be legitimate two-hour talk shows debating why some random 3-9 SEC school should've been No. 72 instead of No. 73 and why they should have gotten the chance to show the world what they're made of, instead of a 6-6 New Mexico State team that played an easy schedule. It's just the nature of the beast that is sport.
I do think that, after the NCAA made the move to seed eight teams this year, rather than just four as they had in previous years, an expansion to 24 teams overall would have made sense. I have nothing against automatic bids for so-called "weaker" conferences.
But that way, you'd give more teams the opportunity to compete, not just the opportunity to be seeded, and the seeded teams would all get the benefit of first-round byes. Right now, you effectively have a first round that consists of two play-in games.
I also question the committee's decision to place such a huge emphasis on RPI when other factors also should come into play. It doesn't necessarily mean that other factors weren't considered; just look at UMass getting in.
Not wanting to allow a ton of subjectivity into the mix is understandable, but you can be totally objective while still being human. Anybody with a calculator and a spreadsheet can figure out RPI simply by taking the time to plug in numbers.
It's not that RPI is unfair; it is completely fair. Everyone plays by the same rules, and the same rules can apply regardless of schedule.
It would be ridiculous and disrespectful in every sense of the word to sit here and say that "UNC doesn't deserve to be in", even though the decision not just to put UNC in but to give them a top-eight seed is questionable, if not controversial, after Syracuse, the actual ACC Tournament champion and a six-loss team (with a stronger RPI) that literally eliminated UNC, was not seeded.
But when you have a team like Liberty, which beat UNC head-to-head and finished with fewer losses, does a 0.005-point difference in RPI really make UNC the more deserving team?
Maybe there's something to that ACC and brand bias we loosely referenced earlier on Sunday... just saying, especially when it could potentially set up a Northwestern vs. UNC rematch in the quarterfinals. It's something to think about.
At least in the case of UMass, which beat two of the toughest teams they played in Harvard and Liberty, they weren't totally docked for dropping down the RPI every time they won another game, simply because they beat "bad" teams. I have zero issue with them being in.
UNC lost to Old Dominion, and their RPI went up because Old Dominion won the Big East title game. On the final day of action before the selections, they were effectively rewarded for playing Old Dominion, irrespective of the fact that they lost.
On the flip side, Penn State did not benefit nearly as much from Northwestern beating Maryland in the Big Ten Championship game, simply because they played both, and one team won while another team lost. Even though both teams effectively added an 18-2 team to their own schedule (and, by association, strength of the schedule), the fact that the game happened produced competing effects on Penn State's own strength of schedule by adding one win and one loss.
So even though Northwestern won the Big Ten title game, UNC's loss to Old Dominion ended up being valued more heavily in Sunday's RPI movements than Penn State's win over Northwestern.
Prior to Sunday's results, Penn State was ahead of UNC in the RPI. Neither team played on Sunday, but UNC moved up because one of the teams they lost to beat somebody else. Penn State moved down despite the No. 1 team in the country, whom they beat, winning.
Of course, it all adds up over a full season. These singular moments didn't decide the entire RPI formula, even if the late changes make it appear that way. They don't singlehandedly mean the RPI is garbage (it's not, even if it's questionable). These kinds of things never truly come down to one result or one play.
But there's still no scientifically battle-tested theory that the RPI formula is absolutely the be-all and end-all when it comes to how teams stack up against one another. Should we make it 50-25-25 instead of 25-50-25? Should it be 30-40-30? What about 33.3-33.3-33.3? The NCAA does have other criteria at their disposal for a reason, but they don't seem to use it consistently.
Why even list "significant wins and losses" in the criteria if they aren't going to be weighted appropriately? UNC lost to a 6-10 Michigan team that didn't even qualify for the Big Ten Tournament, with their only conference win coming against a Michigan State team that went winless in Big Ten play.
Penn State, on the other hand, beat the two-time reigning national champions and the No. 1 team in the country. And they did it in the regular season finale, when one of the NCAA's criteria is literally "late-season performance". Ironically, late-season performance was even cited as a reason why UNC was awarded a spot, after they, like Penn State, started the year 3-4.
That seems pretty significant. But what do I know?
Additionally, the fact that the empty bracket the NCAA posted on their website before the selections were made consisted of only four lines for seeded teams, even after the rule change to eight, makes me question just how much the NCAA truly does prioritize field hockey, how much they prioritize actually watching the games, and how much they truly are committed to a reasonable selection process and to assembling a reasonable bracket.
But that's more nitpickiness on my end than anything. That doesn't affect their decision-making process. Or maybe it does. At this point, I couldn't really tell you.
And the fact that Leah Secondo stated, in no uncertain terms, "Unfortunately their RPI caught up to them", referencing Penn State, in the selection show is completely laughable, given how they ultimately stacked up against UNC.
Wake Forest was the only other "close" team mentioned, so why did UNC's RPI not catch up to them, despite being lower than Wake Forest and, get this, losing to Wake Forest head-to-head – and late in the season, no less? And for as much as we wholeheartedly agree that UMass earned the right to be in, why was that same logic not applied to them?
Penn State has nothing to hang their heads over
Regardless of the disappointment of Selection Sunday, I don't think there's anybody outside of Penn State's locker room that would have predicted how successful their 2026 season would be in year number one under head coach Hannah Prince. But those in the locker room believed that it was possible, and they turned it into a reality in an unforgettable stretch of two-and-a-half months.
To call it anything shy of a massive success would be underselling the turnaround and the resurgence of a team that outsiders were ready to bury even before the season began.
The fact that we even had the chance to talk about UNC and Penn State battling for an NCAA Tournament spot would have been inconceivable in late August or even early September.
At that point, UNC was ranked No. 2 nationally behind Northwestern, Penn State was unranked, and the Nittany Lions even had fan sites declaring, not predicting, that it would take a few years to even get back to the Big Ten Tournament for the first time since 2023. Not only did they get in; they wound up locking themselves into it after just four of their eight Big Ten games this year.
They finished just one game out of tying for the Big Ten regular season championship and earned the No. 3 seed in the bracket after a regular season in which they earned the school's first win over a No. 1 program since 2002.
Their eight-game win streak, which included five straight Big Ten wins after they had won a total of just four Big Ten games since November 2023, was their longest in over a decade. And it took that win streak for Penn State to finally receive the respect they deserve in the national poll. But when they did, they earned their highest rank in over three years.
It doesn't make Sunday's outcome any less disappointing or remove any of the sting; heading into the selections, there was nothing Penn State could control any longer, and their fate was in the committee's hands after their loss to Iowa in the opening round of the Big Ten Tournament.
But after missing the postseason entirely in 2024 and 2025, this team firmly put themselves on the radar both in the Big Ten and nationally, and did so with standout performances from more key contributors throughout the season than we can reasonably count. They are also in line to return a significant number of those contributors in Prince's second season.
Perhaps one year from now Penn State will hear their name called and those contributors will get the opportunity to shine on the NCAA's national stage, something the program has not had since 2022.
Add us as a preferred source on Google