Adam Augustine is a pragmatic man.
A son of the great state of Wisconsin, the senior director of sports administration for the Big Ten is of course pleased with what he’s seeing from B1G hockey this season, but his Midwestern sensibilities add a dose of slow-your-roll when discussing any bigger picture.
“While it’s nice that we’re talking in January about having all of these teams in great positions and how the league looks stronger than perhaps it ever has,” said Augustine. “It’s still only January, and everybody here would be open to admitting that the business end of the season is still coming. We certainly hope that having all these high-end teams – what’s the saying? iron sharpening iron? – is really just the beginning for us and that we can sustain this going forward.”
Augustine joined the Big Ten when the Big Ten joined college hockey. In his current position, he oversees the administrative side of rowing and women’s tennis in addition to hockey and other Olympic sports, but Augustine began on the communication side of things, serving as the primary point of contact for hockey for the Big Ten’s first few seasons as associate director for communications. He also ran the inaugural Big Ten hockey tournament.
In 2016, Augustine moved over to Big Ten football, becoming that sport’s primary media contact and coordinating the massive undertaking that is the Big Ten football championship game.
In his current role, he’s no longer a media contact per se, but he’s back in the hockey world, a place where he’s as knowledgeable as he is comfortable. Augustine now runs coaches meetings, helps construct the Big Ten hockey schedule, coordinates with the Big Ten Network, and runs postseason events. And he has the perfect vantage point from which to provide some perspective about how B1G hockey has emerged as the dominant conference this season.
“We’re in year 10 now and it’s interesting to kind of look back at the trajectory of the conference,” said Augustine. “Some of our main programs were in a little bit of flux – at least our historical programs, perhaps, if you look at where Michigan and Wisconsin were – 10 years ago at the outset of all this.”
When the conference formed in 2013, it drew Wisconsin and Minnesota away from the WCHA and Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State from the CCHA, adding Penn State, which moved to Division 1 hockey in 2012. In 2017, Notre Dame joined the conference as an associate member.
Since its inception, the conference has seen six teams combine for 18 NCAA tournament appearances, including six Frozen Four appearances by four of those teams and two teams – Minnesota (2014) and Notre Dame (2018) – losing in the national championship game.
Even with the title game losses, what the league has put together in 10 seasons is impressive in light of the flux that Augustine mentioned. There has been little consistency to the conference from the very beginning. Ohio State’s Steve Rohlik and Penn State’s Guy Gadowsky share the distinction of being the only two current head coaches who were behind a Big Ten team bench when the conference began in 2013.
Then when world went sideways in 2020, it did so just three months after the Big Ten brought in new commissioner Kevin Warren. Individually, several programs have gone through massive changes and on an administrative level, the conference has seen reorganization during a time when people couldn’t even share office space because of COVID.
With roughly a month of regular-season play remaining, the Big Ten holds the best inter-conference win percentage (.721) in college hockey, has four teams ranked among the top 10 and six of its seven teams at No. 15 or above in the PairWise Rankings. All three B1G series played last weekend saw splits. There’s no denying it’s a tough league. This season, a word that’s bandied about too freely in sports – parity – is also a genuine part of the equation. While the circumstances differ, Augustine said that there have been two times in B1G hockey history where he’s seen this kind of relative parity within the conference.
“One of them is that 2014-15 season,” said Augustine. “That one to me was true parity. It was more parity in the sense that we were lacking at the top, a little less of a situation where you had top-10 teams but just a bunch of teams in that middle tier.” The only Big Ten team that went to the NCAA tournament that season was Minnesota, the regular-season and playoff B1G champions. “I remember we had three teams playing for the championship that last weekend,” said Augustine, “but ultimately none of them were truly a threat at the national level.”
That changed in 2017-2018 when Notre Dame moved from Hockey East to the Big Ten. The Fighting Irish had gone to the NCAA tournament three of the four seasons they played in Hockey East, culminating in their national semifinal loss to eventual champion Denver in the 2017 Frozen Four.
“That was the year that Notre Dame joins the league coming off the Frozen Four and absolutely rolled through the league in the first half,” said Augustine. “It was really something to watch. The second half was a little tighter and ultimately nobody was able to catch them, but I do think that being forced to try to raise their level of play and match what they saw in Notre Dame, that really started to lift the rest of the league. That ended up leading to the three teams in the Frozen Four. That felt like a little bit more of a surprise, perhaps, at the time.”
Augustine said that it’s also interesting to look at the different paths each Big Ten program has taken since the formation of the league.
“Bob at this point has things very much rolling in Minnesota, living up to some very high standards that that fan base has for that program,” said Augustine.
Bob Motzko became the Minnesota coach in 2018, following Don Lucia’s 19-year tenure and Motzko’s own 13 years as St. Cloud State’s head coach.
“Compare that to, say, Ohio State and Penn State,” Augustine said. “Those are the only two coaches in the league who were here for those first games in 2013.”
“Steve at Ohio State, I think it’s fair to say that he’s probably had the most consistent results of any program over the 10 years, and I think perhaps that sometimes goes underappreciated. They’ve been a model of consistency for 10 years. It’s not the same as what’s happening in Michigan or Minnesota or even Wisconsin in stretches where it’s a whole bunch of first-round draft picks filling up the roster. He just finds a way to be successful with what he has year after year after year.
“Then you look at Penn State and the rise they’ve had over 10 years. The fact that they’d reached the point that by March 2020 they had won the [conference] tournament and they had won our regular-season title. For them to kind of have the floor fall out from underneath them a little bit when the season got canceled [in 2020] and perhaps disrupting what they had going, it’s good to see them back to what they’d built their way to.
“And we haven’t even talked about Michigan or Notre Dame or what Adam is doing at Michigan State.”
“Adam,” of course, is Adam Nightingale, one of two first-year Big Ten head coaches. Nightingale is the third head coach that the Spartans have seen since the start of Big Ten hockey, replacing Danton Cole at the start of this season. Cole came in after the Spartans parted ways with Tom Anastos in 2017.
Michigan is also on its third head coach since the formation of B1G hockey. The Wolverines began with Red Berenson, who retired in 2017. Former Michigan associate head coach Mel Pearson left his head coaching position at Michigan Tech to take over after Berenson, but Pearson was let go last August. Brandon Naurato, an assistant under Pearson, has served as interim head coach since.
And Notre Dame – led by Jeff Jackson since 2005 – has continued to push everyone in the conference. Of those 18 NCAA tournament appearances that Big Ten teams have made, four belong to Notre Dame.
The Irish – with their overall record of 11-12-3 and B1G record of 6-8-2-1 – are sitting at No. 15 in the PWR. Because of the strength of the Big Ten this year, Notre Dame has the ability to play itself into the NCAA tournament in its eight remaining games.
Augustine said he grew up watching WCHA hockey at a time when that conference was a dominant force in college hockey, and he knows what can happen when teams are tempered by playing high-end teams week after week.
“I think what’s special this year is that you’ve got six teams the last time I looked in the top 15 in the PairWise,” said Augustine. “Even Wisconsin that isn’t quite at that same level is still sitting around 30th. It’s a Wisconsin team that’s beaten half the other teams in the league so far and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them doing that for the rest of the year.”
As someone who was hired in B1G hockey’s inaugural season to help shape the overall narrative of that new conference, Augustine knows how a good story should end. Happily ever after comes to mind. But in addition to having that pragmatic Midwestern nature, Augustine is also a hockey person. Hockey people are superstitious.
“I think the real difference is that in a lot of ways, what we’re seeing from Big Ten hockey this year is what many of us expected or hoped for all along,” he said. “Whether or not that proves – I’ll stop that train of thought.”
And we’ll see how far that train goes come March.
