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.
Dan: Good morning, and a happy week to everyone out there.
Just like that, all of the posturing and conversation from the past few weeks about which teams could make the NCAA tournament, well…it came to a close, and on Saturday night – and Sunday – we learned the 16 schools that will compete for the right to hoist a national championship. The seeds are complete, the regionals are done, and we’re set to begin the most thrilling and exhausting part of our schedule.
There were upsets along the way, and as a result, certain teams were left out of the dance. Merrimack clinched its way into the tournament by winning its semifinal game against UMass Lowell, but Alaska was left on the outside after Colgate shocked the ECAC with its first Whitelaw Cup in 30 years. Colorado College, meanwhile, nearly crashed the party by advancing to the NCHC’s championship game.
Again, we’re down to our last 16 teams. Paula, what was the biggest surprise of the weekend for you, and is there a takeaway that can encompass everything we saw?
Paula: Dan, I watched as much of the conference finals as I could – it’s my favorite weekend of the hockey season – and I saw a lot of excellent, excellent hockey. That may be my biggest takeaway from the weekend.
Seven games out of 12 took overtime to resolve and two went to double OT. Each of those games was amazing. In those seven games, going into overtime there was little sense of the eventual OT outcome, and that in itself was both exciting and telling.
Of the five games that did not require extra play, three were one-goal games and two were 3-0 shutouts. I cannot recall a conference playoff weekend as exciting and unpredictable as this one, which may make for a very good NCAA tournament.
You mention Colgate, and the Raiders’ run was so much fun to watch. They played great hockey throughout the ECAC playoffs, and they could very well give Michigan all the Wolverines can handle – and maybe more – in Allentown.
The team that took me completely by surprise in a very good way was Merrimack. I knew how tight Hockey East was and I liked what I saw from nearly everyone this season, but the Warriors absolutely elevated their play through this past weekend and earned their NCAA tournament berth.
In fact, that Manchester, N.H. bracket will, in my opinion, provide the best hockey of the regionals weekend. I thought Quinnipiac looked a little exposed in the ECAC tournament, and I know that good teams can and will learn from such experiences, but if the Warriors can bottle what they had in the Hockey East playoffs, the Bobcats will have a huge fight on their hands.
I was equally impressed with Harvard, and I can see another Big Ten higher-seed potential upset there.
Our good friends Jimmy Connelly and Jayson Moy had Ohio State and Minnesota in the Fargo bracket in their final Bracketology before the selection show, so another thing that surprised me – because they are usually so spot on – is that three Big Ten teams have the potential to advance to the Frozen Four as opposed to two. I do not believe that will happen, but it could.
What do you see from the conference championship weekend that may foreshadow regional play?
Dan: This might be the kiss of death, but I think Michigan might be the team to beat – and it echoes a couple of points I’ve made over the past few weeks.
One, I think Michigan went out and proved that it’s the best team in the Big Ten, something that wasn’t true when the postseason started. For all the talk about the Wolverines being that good and having a roster loaded with unreal hockey talent, they weren’t even the regular season champions of their conference. They weren’t as good as Minnesota at the time, and the only way I said they could prove otherwise was to go out and win some clutch hockey games. They did that by beating Ohio State, but the Minnesota game cleared out some unfinished business. Winning the Big Ten championship – especially by coming from behind (twice!) – supplanted Minnesota as the league’s toughest national entry.
Even with a different seed, it’s hard to find a team that’s better suited to win in the postseason, and that leads me to my second point, which is about teams that maybe aren’t the best team overall but ARE the best team to win in a championship, single-game format.
For that, I actually think we’re going to see a major upset in the first round. That shouldn’t surprise anyone with what we’ve seen through the years, but one of those top seeds is going to lose to a team that’s riding the hot hand into the tournament. Merrimack, as you mentioned, won its way into the tournament by winning a semifinal matchup, and a first-round matchup with No. 2 overall Quinnipiac feels enticing because the Bobcats looked like a system that had been broken up a bit by Colgate. I wouldn’t put it past Cornell, which could have been a No. 2 seed in a regional if it won the ECAC, to beat Denver in a regional that’s forcing the defending champs to fly across the country.
And Minnesota State might not be the same Minnesota State from the past couple of years, but that regional is a group of death, even with Canisius, a No. 4 seed in the Atlantic Hockey postseason, offering a hot goaltender… don’t forget what happened to St. Cloud all those years ago with AIC.
One thing that’s for sure about this tournament is that it’s offering a good blend of newer powers and old school bluebloods. A region with Quinnipiac and Merrimack features Harvard. A region with Michigan features Penn State, and a region with Denver, BU and Cornell has Western Michigan, a team that I thought was going to win the NCHC.
Whenever we cross the old school with the new school, there’s going to be some explosiveness. Which team are you personally excited to see in the tournament, and how is this field both a tribute to the old school and the new school at the same time?
Paula: I don’t know how to answer the old school-new school question, because I think that what we’re seeing this season is something completely different from that – but also a continuation of what we were beginning to see before COVID disrupted everything, including college hockey.
In the 12-year span between 2001 and 2012, Boston College won the national championship four times, Minnesota twice, Denver twice, and several other programs that are or once were traditional powerhouses – Boston University, Michigan State, Wisconsin – one once each.
That was also the decade or so in which Minnesota Duluth built a newer powerhouse program, winning in 2011 and then twice more just before the pandemic hit.
Between 2013 and Duluth’s title in 2018, five different programs won the title with three first-time winners – Yale (2013), Union (2014) and Providence (2015) – and in 2021, UMass won its first national championship.
We’ve discussed here many times the elevated level of play across college hockey in the last decade or so, and I see this year’s tournament as a return to pre-COVID disruption patterns of emerging excellence. It’s hard to quantify what the shortened 2020-21 season did to D-I men’s hockey, but we know that it completely disrupted the Ivies, extended the collegiate careers of some players, and moved several players around.
I think the Ivies – and the ECAC in general – needed these last two seasons to get to return to the level of play they had prior to that COVID disruption. Some teams – Michigan State, for example, with the addition of a solid, seasoned Dylan St. Cyr in net – took advantage of the shifting landscape to help rebuilding. Some retained other veterans – like Penn State did – to fuel an NCAA run.
Penn State is the most concrete example I can give of a building program that was disrupted by COVID. They began to play D-I hockey in 2014, rose quickly because of excellent recruiting and coaching, and then really faltered through 2020-21 and 2021-22. I’m not telling tales out of school, so to speak, as coach Guy Gadowski has been frank about how the disruption affected his team and how this is the first season the Nittany Lions feel whole and on the right track again.
Other coaches may not talk about the way that COVID year and its aftermath affected their programs, but you can bet that many were affected. This is only the second season of a normal schedule since 2020. I don’t think it’s old school-new school. I think that college hockey is picking up where it left off in March 2020.
As for the first part of your question, I have two answers to that.
I’m excited for all four Big Ten teams. This season of B1G Hockey was one of the most exciting seasons of college hockey that I’ve ever covered. Minnesota and Michigan are both loaded, and I do think that Minnesota is the best team in the country in spite of having lost that title game to Michigan. Ohio State and Penn State are solid, can turn it up, and play gutsy hockey. After seeing three teams from the Big Ten lose in St. Paul in 2018 – and that feels like a decade ago now instead of five years – I would be delighted to see more than one B1G team advance and for the conference to capture its first national title.
But … I have an emotional stake in Western Michigan, I loved the way Colgate played in the ECAC tournament, and I think that Merrimack is a team to beat.
Dan, this is our last TMQ of the season. What do you want to leave readers with from college hockey this year?
Dan: I’ve truly learned to appreciate the current state of college hockey because change is such a big part of the new college experience. The transfer portal, NIL, and everything else has made it feel so different, but at the end of the day, the four regionals represent a purity to the game. It’s a simple equation that even the most ardent and hardened reformist or traditionalist can embrace together. Sixteen teams head to four regionals, and the winners advance. There has to be a winner. Someone’s heart is going to be ripped out.
College hockey is going to change, and I think we’re scraping the iceberg of those changes. Michelle Morgan is one prime example – young and energetic, she’s stepping into Atlantic Hockey at a time when the league is ready to take on new challenges. ECAC’s new commissioner, meanwhile, will be tasked with preserving a strong, traditional conference while simultaneously continuing its movement into the new era. New buildings, scholarships, the sheer money that programs have to invest, it’s all part of the conversation and package now, and the teams that are willing to invest are going to pioneer some of that change.
Let’s sit back and enjoy these next few weeks. I’m going to turn into a fan over the regionals and find myself rooting for Boston University like I did when I was a kid at Walter Brown Arena, and I’m going to root for my Atlantic Hockey champion Canisius Golden Griffins because, well, the 11 teams (yep, 11, I see you, Robert Morris) operate as one fist in the tournament. I’m going to pull for one of the four ECAC teams, and I’m going to simply live in the moment.
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how much I love this sport. I echo those thoughts as I sit here and ready to watch the games with my two daughters. Hockey is a phenomenal sport because of the people. Those who invest emotionally in this game make it that way with their passion. Don’t ever let that go, folks, and I’ll hopefully get to see some of you celebrate like there’s no tomorrow in Tampa.
All of that said, I want you to have the last word, as always. This being our TMQ swan song, what’s your message to the folks who have stuck with us all year?
Paula: This year, my message is informed by some of what we saw unfold in the conference I cover, the Big Ten: love our sport with all your might but don’t stick your head in the sand when the sport itself is sending you messages.
Four of the most impactful things that happened in college hockey or adjacent to it this season involved three Big Ten programs. Some issues that these events exposed are likely happening elsewhere, but because the Big Ten is such a high-profile league, news traveled fast.
First was the University of Michigan parting ways with Mel Pearson. The WilmerHale report released last summer alleged many unethical things, from instructing players to lie about COVID tests to verbal abuse of players.
Second was the adenovirus that ripped through the Wolverines, hospitalizing many players and sending Steven Holtz to the hospital for an extended stay.
Third was Spartan Jagger Joshua’s courageous tweet calling out powers that be for not doing enough following an incident in which Ohio State’s Kamil Sadlocha allegedly threw a racial slur at Joshua during a game. It’s important to note here, too, that Sadlocha apologized and went through diversity training as a result.
Fourth was the awful mass shooting at Michigan State University.
These are related in two ways. These events show that hockey – like all collegiate sports – is played within a greater context and that there are real, live human beings involved with the programs. As fans, we experience games (and the sport, to some degree) as consumers of an entertaining product. We should never lose sight of the fact that peoples’ lives are affected by events that transpire on the ice and near these programs.
The second way that these events are related is that they show us the best of us as well as some ways in which we’d like to improve. Brandon Naurato – a coach who appears to have the best interest of his players’ whole selves in mind – was hired as interim. (That “interim” tag should be dropped, but I digress.) I can’t imagine a better person at the Michigan helm in the wake of Pearson’s departure, especially when Holtz nearly died and several players were severely sickened.
Like Naurato, Adam Nightingale and Steve Rohlik each showed their character in positive ways in the wake of what Joshua went through. It is still infuriating that Joshua had to make the incident public before something substantive was done in response, and that is a message we should definitely hear.
The trauma of a campus shooting cannot be described. What Tony Granato and Wisconsin did in response the week following the shooting in East Lansing showed Granato’s fundamental decency. He’ll land on his feet somewhere in part because he really is a good human.
Hockey should work to address cultural things that hurt the sport. Treating players like whole human beings should be a default, not an aspiration.
And the hockey world should know now that there are things that can neither be predicted nor controlled, but that by realizing that the sport is played within a bigger context, the right reactions to those things may mitigate both personal fallout and damage to programs.
In the end, this is a hopeful message. It was a rough year in the Big Ten – but it was also a great year for Big Ten hockey. Those are high-profile stories that we know about, but I suspect that what happened in the Big Ten is happening everywhere in college hockey.
And that, too, is a very hopeful thing, because look at the glorious hockey that we saw in conference play last weekend and the hockey that we’re anticipating in the regionals.
We all love a good underdog story, and college hockey itself is in many ways an underdog among D-I sports. It’s been such a fun, rewarding season to watch.
I’m so grateful, Dan, to you and our colleagues Jimmy Connelly and Ed Trefzger for what we’ve been able to discuss in TMQ this season, and grateful to our long-suffering editor, Matt Mackinder, who’s helped us along the way.
I’m always grateful for the readers who have stuck with us.
This year, though, I’m keenly aware of the perseverance displayed by every team that’s made it this far – by every team, period. Here’s to a great postseason.
May the best team win.
