If you’ve ever followed Bowling Green’s hockey social media account, you’ll notice an odd tradition. They call it “The Diamond Cutter:”
Every time the Falcons complete a weekend series sweep, longtime BGSU equipment manager Scott “Scooter” Jess leaps off a cooler in the locker room and does a wrestling move inspired by former WWE and WCW superstar “Diamond” Dallas Page.
Scooter is always egged on by the entire Falcons team. Usually, he gets high fives and chest bumps.
Occasionally, he will invite other fans into the mix.
Diamond Cutter 💎✂️
Starring Scooter & Blake pic.twitter.com/h2cSd8789s
— Bowling Green Hockey (@BGFalconHockey) January 8, 2023
It’s a goofy, fun ritual – squarely in time-honored tradition of “Dudes Rock.”
“Everybody that follows social media can see right there how excited our players get when we win that second game on the weekend and they start the ‘Scoot’ chant, and he gets going, and then he just, I don’t know what happens, transforms or has some sort of out of body experience or something like that,” BGSU coach Ty Eigner said of the team’s post-sweep custom. “It’s been neat to give people the opportunity to see what our guys see and feel it.”
For the THIRD consecutive weekend, we present: The Diamond Cutter💎✂️ pic.twitter.com/zckpAVkzpg
— Bowling Green Hockey (@BGFalconHockey) January 15, 2023
The Falcons have recently shown their fans a lot of the Diamond Cutter this past month. Their home sweep of Bemidji State this past weekend was their third in a row, and followed sweeps of RPI and Lake Superior State in the two previous weekends.
“You know how hard it is to sweep in college hockey, and we’ve been fortunate enough to string together three in a row here,” Eigner said. “So when you do that, winning fixes a lot of ailments, individually and collectively.”
It’s been a nice reversal of fortunes for Bowling Green (14-12-0, 11-7-0 CCHA), who ended the first half of the season on the other end of sweeps at the hands of Minnesota State and Ohio State. The Buckeyes outscored the Falcons 14-6 over the two legs of their home-and-home series, while BG managed to score just three goals against the Mavericks.
Coming back from the break, the Falcons seemed to have improved their scoring touch – they’ve averaged 4.5 goals per game during this six-game win streak. That could partly be due to the fact that RPI and LSSU are in the bottom third of the Pairwise rankings compared to Ohio State (No. 6) and Minnesota State (No. 15). But goals are still goals, and they build confidence. And besides, BG’s problem this season really hasn’t been scoring – their 3.4 goals per game are the most in the CCHA.
“We have players that are capable, and we’ve had different stretches over the course of the first half where we have scored goals,” Eigner said. And, case-in-point: Austen Swankler leads the league with 36 points while Ryan O’Hara is tied with three other players for second in scoring with 25 points. In all, five of the top 11 scorers in the CCHA so far are BG players.
“The thing we’ve been most focused on is giving up less goals, and they go hand-in-hand,” Eigner said about BGSU’s defensive record, which has been mediocre. They have given up 3.12 goals a game. “If we defend better, that means we spend less time in our own end and we can get to the offensive zone, which is a lot more fun and guys enjoy that part a lot better. [In the past six games] we’ve defended better, which leads to us playing in the offensive zone and scoring more.”
The consecutive wins against Lake Superior State and Bemidji State also allowed the Falcons to earn some valuable conference points and move into first place in the CCHA standings – if only temporarily. BG has 35 points through 18 games played and is five points ahead of second-place Minnesota State and seven ahead of third-place Michigan Tech. However, both the Mavericks and the Huskies have played just 16 games while Bemidji State and Ferris State (in fourth and fifth place) are also in striking distance and have played only 14 games each.
In other words, the Falcons do not control their own destiny when it comes to a possible CCHA championship.
“Everybody’s looking at the standings, let’s be honest. Everybody knows where we sit,” Eigner said. “What we’ve tried to talk about with our team is, we’re going to take it weekend by weekend, because there are two weekends where we won’t play, and we won’t have the opportunity to earn points on this weekend where other teams will.”
The Falcons travel to Minnesota this weekend when they will take on St. Thomas. They already swept the Tommies in their earlier season series in Ohio, but both games were hard-fought 3-2 wins. And St. Thomas is coming off a signature road victory against Michigan Tech.
“We’ve played as many league games as anybody, so teams are going to have an opportunity to catch us and we need to make sure that in the remaining CCHA series we have, we’ve got to do the best we can to get as many points as possible,” Eigner said. “It’s important to bank as many of those points as we can.”
