Each week during the season, we look at the big events and big games around Division I men’s college hockey in Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
Paula: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays to you, Ed, and to all of our readers!
As the first half of the season comes to a close, there is a lot to discuss. There are some really tight conference races shaping up with the notable exception of the CCHA, where Minnesota State holds an 11-point lead over second-place Bemidji State.
As exciting as conference play has been this season – in what feels like a welcome return to something resembling normal after the 2020-21 year – the biggest news may be two stories that are happening off the ice. The first is the promised return of hockey to Robert Morris University beginning with the 2023-24 season. In a press release announcing hockey’s reinstatement, RMU president Chris Howard said, “This is the beginning of a journey, not the end.”
Like everyone in college hockey, I couldn’t be happier for RMU hockey, for coach Derek Schooley, and for the entire D-I community. I confess, though, that I have a hard time seeing why this particular journey needed to be taken at all – and I hope that RMU as an institution follows through on its commitment to hockey.
The second off-ice story is the developing news surrounding COVID. After announcing the suspension of its hockey program, Cornell shut down the whole campus in favor of virtual finals because of the rapid spread of the omicron variant throughout the school and the local community. Today we get the announcement that Boston will require proof of vaccine for everyone attending indoor events starting January.
In the NHL, the Flyers and the Canadiens played in an empty arena in Montreal last week. We’ve had sporadic postponements in the first half of the season, but this feels a little like waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It’s a lot to process. What are your thoughts about how the first half of the season is ending?
Ed: Let’s start with the first story. The resurrection of Robert Morris men’s and women’s hockey is terrific news, and I agree that it seemed to be an unnecessary process.
A telling moment came at the RMU news conference last Friday, when Schooley, appearing by Zoom video from Arizona, was taking questions. A reporter asked if in retrospect the decision to drop the programs had been a mistake. Schooley replied that he didn’t hear the question, and Howard, striding to the podium, said, “You’re lucky you didn’t hear the question.”
Howard removed his mask and then flatly replied, “No,” and went on to explain that it had been a necessary decision based on the information they had at the time. “We needed a rally,” Howard said. “We needed the community to step forward.”
And step forward they did.
I think what people underestimate about hockey – which we’d freely have to admit is a niche sport, albeit the largest niche sport – is that there’s an incredible culture shared by players and coaches, parents and kids, and teams and their fans. When a program is threatened, all of college hockey rallies, as we’ve seen at RMU, Alaska Anchorage, Alabama Huntsville, and several years ago now at Bowling Green.
Any university that thinks that the hockey community will slink away quietly is sadly mistaken. We’ve seen too many teams fall by the wayside in past decades, and we don’t want to see it again.
Now to COVID. I’ve tried to remain cautiously optimistic all along, which at times isn’t easy. Paula, you’re right that there may be another shoe to drop, and it may mean lots of rescheduling and it may mean no fans in the building, but we’re in a much better place this season. As I noted in this week’s Monday 10, there have been some COVID incidents this season, and perhaps more than have been made public, but the high vaccination rates and quick recoveries suggest that we can move forward. Let’s remember that vaccines didn’t roll out to the college-age group in any great number until after the Frozen Four.
Now, how about some hockey? While No. 1 Minnesota State has an 11-point lead at the break, every other conference has a weekend or less of a gap at the top. Are we in a season where we could see no league crowning a regular-season champ before the final weekend?
Paula: Yes! Or at least that’s what I am hoping for. A nail-biter of a final weekend in multiple leagues would be the perfect follow-up to last year’s season-long, COVID-forced weirdness.
Every program wants to be the runaway train of its conference, and fans of those top programs enjoy that particular ride, but for college hockey in general – and for all of us who just love our niche sport – I can’t imagine anything more exciting than several regular-season conference championships coming down to the final weekend.
The possibilities are intriguing, too. Bentley, who leads Canisius by three points on top of the Atlantic Hockey standings, has three of its four final regular-season weekends against the league’s current bottom-three teams.
In the Big Ten, Michigan is ahead of second-place Minnesota by four points, third-place Ohio State by five, and fourth-place Notre Dame by six – and finishes on the road against Notre Dame following a home set against the Buckeyes.
The ECAC is crazy. First-place Cornell has 18 points, followed by Harvard and Quinnipiac with 17 points each and then Clarkson with 16 points. The Big Red face both Clarkson and Quinnipiac in their final three contests.
In Hockey East, eight points separate first-place UMass-Lowell from sixth-place Boston University. The last weekend of regular-season HEA play features a set series between two of those top six teams, Massachusetts and Boston College, while the River Hawks play another top-six HEA team, Providence, in the final month, too.
Like most years, the NCHC is especially competitive, with the top six of its eight teams looking strong enough to make a second-half run. There’s a points drop-off after North Dakota’s league-leading 24, but the next five teams are very, very good. North Dakota’s last six games are against Minnesota Duluth, Western Michigan, and Omaha, and two of those three series are on the road.
And the tight conference action is reflected in the current PairWise Rankings, where some excellent teams are bubble teams, including Cornell, Providence, Ohio State and Northeastern.
I don’t have any magic reasoning to explain the parity this season – and you know how suspicious I am of that word, parity. Whatever’s happening is serving up some entertaining college hockey. And I don’t have a crystal ball to see how any of this will end.
Some of the teams that are in this mix have surprised me in the first half, most notably Ohio State, picked last in the B1G preseason coaches’ poll, and Cornell and Harvard – simply because the Ivies sat out last year and I expected them to need a minute to adjust.
What are you looking forward to in the second half? What, if anything, has surprised you about the first half?
Ed: My No. 1 surprise this season has to be Western Michigan. First-year head coach Pat Ferschweiler has the Broncos solidly in second place in the NCHC, and his team did that after looking like they were in trouble early in conference play. After getting swept at Denver, WMU had lost three straight and was just 1-3 in conference. But five consecutive league wins, beginning with a sweep at home of St. Cloud State, and just one loss, 1-0, to Omaha, really turned things around.
Western Michigan had been as high as No. 1 in the Pairwise, and the Broncos are at No. 6 today. Their remaining NCHC schedule is challenging, but if WMU can go, say, 8-6 or better in its remaining league games, a top-four NCHC finish and an NCAA at-large are within their grasp.
What am I looking forward to? You mentioned Northeastern as a bubble team. I’m looking forward to seeing what Jerry Keefe’s team can do. Let’s not forget, we never got to see Devon Levi in a Huskies uniform last season. All he’s done this year is post six shutouts, rack up a .955 save percentage, and achieve a 1.33 GAA. A depleted Northeastern lineup swept a home-and-home series with Providence just prior to the break, thanks in part to just one goal given up by Levi on 72 shots for the weekend. It’s just too bad that Matthews Arena will be empty of fans for at least the short term.
Paula, you pointed to parity – and I know it gets brought up a lot – but a number of things have led to it: excellent coaches, video analysis and analytics, or a fifth year for players meaning more experience. But another has to be talent; just look at the number of players who are capable of playing at the highest level but who can’t find a spot. We really need more teams at D-I, which hasn’t seen the growth that D-III has.
If Old St. Nick were bringing you more D-I hockey teams down the chimney, how many would you ask for in your letter to Santa?
Paula: All of them. I want as many D-I teams as there are college club hockey teams.
I know that’s not realistic, as there are currently 71 ACHA Division I teams competing right now, some at schools where there are NCAA D-I men’s teams and at least one — Syracuse University — that has an NCAA D-I women’s team but not a men’s team.
There are nearly 200 D-II teams and close to 150 D-III ACHA teams, indicating an enormous interest in the sport at the collegiate level. We know that the barrier to adding D-I teams often comes down to the initial funding of a program.
To answer your question more feasibly, I’ll return to something I’ve said this repeatedly in this column: I want schools with big athletic departments that also have ACHA teams to create NCAA D-I programs. Take a look at the Southeastern College Hockey Conference, for example. There’s the University of Georgia, the University of Tennessee, Florida State, Clemson.
Look at the PAC-8 in D-II in the ACHA — UCLA, Oregon, Washington, Stanford just to name a few. There are eight teams alone in the Texas Collegiate Hockey Conference, including the University of Texas and Texas A&M.
I know I’m a dreamer, but these are the kinds of programs that I’d like to see make the jump to D-I sooner rather than later. I’d love the schools that aren’t big household names, too, and what they bring to college hockey — as everyone who knows me knows — but to grow the sport, we need big schools to step up. Since we’re asking Santa, I’m going to say pretty please to bring back Findlay, Kent State, Ohio University, and Wayne State.
As greedy as I am, I’d be happy with the addition of either of the B1G teams — Iowa and Illinois — who have been discussing D-I programs. Ten more teams total would make me ecstatic. An even 100 teams total? I’d never recover.
You?
Ed: Well, Santa tells me you’ve been very good this year, Paula … but maybe not 100 teams good.
I think LIU – and for that matter, Arizona State – has shown us that you don’t need a massive benefactor like Terry Pegula was at Penn State to make things happen. So while the big universities seem to have the resources, they also have to look at making a bigger splash when they make the move and that may be too costly.
There have been a lot of smaller schools dipping their toe into considering D-I hockey. Augustana has made the commitment. Lindenwood seems close. Illinois was apparently on the verge before COVID, and Navy has been rumored to be near a decision, well, forever.
Still, no matter how many teams are added, the biggest issue is where to put them. Some rearrangements are obvious and get mentioned often, like moving Western Michigan and Miami to (back to?) the CCHA. Heck, everyone outside of Atlantic Hockey seems happy to have that conference take on every speculated or new or unaffiliated or rejected team east of the Mississippi – and take the blame if they don’t.
Why not think a little more creatively? What if we blow things up a bit?
People often suggest splitting Atlantic Hockey regionally after first cramming it with 15, 16, 17 teams, but what about a split along academic lines? There are some schools that are a lot more selective than others and there’s not a lot connecting them outside of Atlantic Hockey. Or if we’re talking a reorganization geographically, what about a league within New York State and the 10 non-Ivies there? Five of those institutions already have very selective academic programs and are members of the D-III Liberty League in everything else.
Finally, why not take a page from the NEWHA, the women’s conference made up of mostly D-II schools? Seven teams participate in the Northeast 10 men’s D-II hockey conference with no NCAA tournament. That would be an instant D-I league, and that’s without including current NE-10 programs at Bentley and AIC.
Maybe 100 isn’t that far-fetched. We’ve gotten most of the way there already in the last few paragraphs. We’d better be very good in 2022 if we want that in our stocking next December.
