EP Rinkside NCAA November power rankings

This article is presented by Everything College Hockey

The November 11 cutoff has come and gone.

Since the start of the 16-team NCAA tournament in 2003-04, this is a date at which it becomes easy to see which teams "have it" and which do not. Of the 270 teams that have been in a top-15 position in the Pairwise rankings on November 11, more than 60 percent have made the tournament at the end of the year.

And they say those October games don't matter much.

If the average holds, six of the teams that were top-15 in the Pairwise as of the end of games on Saturday are going to drop out at some point in the next four months or so.

That may sound like a lot, but with autobids, strength-of-schedule considerations, and non-conference records, the opportunities for teams on the outside of the top 15 right now to make up ground are going to be few and far between for the rest of the season.

Put another way, we likely already know the vast majority of teams that will make the NCAA tournament in March. We don't know the order, of course, and there are some contenders that are guaranteed to leapfrog a few teams that are currently up there, but the picture is pretty strong.

With that in mind, now is the time for your old buddies at EP Rinkside to launch our first-ever NCAA Power Rankings, taking a look at who's hot and who's not, and why.

Our expert panel (if I do say so myself) of J.D. Burke, Sara Civian, Sean Shapiro, and me have ranked the top 20 teams in the country, and this is where we're at a few days after that all-important November 11 date.

Here's what we came up with for our inaugural ranking: