There was a time around Christmas when the thought of moving the Cleary Cup away from Quinnipiac felt like a fool’s bet.
The Bobcats’ near-perfect 9-0-1 record placed them 11 points clear of their next-closest competitor thanks in no small part to a 5:1 scoring margin against ECAC opponents. They equally dominated the national rankings with the inside track towards a No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament’s Pairwise Rankings, and few of the second half matchups offered potential potholes for a team that started to straighten itself out after transitioning away from last year’s national championship.
Cornell certainly wasn’t moving that needle at the time. The two wins at Arizona State shifted a significant amount of attention back towards Lynah Rink after the Big Red effectively eliminated the Sun Devils from national contention, but a string of conference results aside from the opening sweep over Brown and Yale produced a seventh-place position with a 3-4-1 record.
Challenger after challenger tried in vain to catch the Quinnipiac machine, but ECAC’s newfound parity ensured short-lived breakaways from the league’s peloton. No team captured the Bobcats’ magic, at least not until the Big Red – the team nobody talked about – exploded over the past month.
Another weekend sweep last week brought Cornell within eight points of Quinnipiac with a game in hand, and while the Bobcats are still the heavy favorite to win the Cleary Cup, it’s clear that the national storyline surrounding ECAC can’t go anywhere until head coach Mike Schafer’s team has its say.
“You can’t really impact what other people think about you,” Schafer said. “But I think it was around Christmas where we just needed to get better as a hockey team. We had to be better as a coaching staff, and around Christmas, we really evaluated what we were emphasizing in practice and asked if we were fundamentally sound enough to be a better hockey team. The answer was no, and we got back to things that sound basic but were just about the ability to win a puck battle and protect the puck by using your body and getting people around the puck. And after that, we started to become a better hockey team.”
Better is an understatement. Cornell fast-started as an undefeated team in October after it swept Minnesota-Duluth and won six points from the Brown-Yale road weekend, but the next weekend of league play offered just one point from a Dartmouth-Harvard series played on home ice. The weekend after that sent the team to Quinnipiac for a humbling 8-4 loss on Friday before a 2-1 overtime loss to Princeton on Saturday, and a later split against Colgate sent the Big Red hurtling down the standings despite a non-conference win over Boston University at Madison Square Garden.
None of it crippled Cornell, but the league quickly developed its one-bid reputation this year because everyone seemed to fall significantly behind Quinnipiac. The Big Red remained nationally ranked by the time they arrived in Lake Placid for the Adirondack Winter Festival, but they also sat at No. 21 in the PairWise Rankings with limited games remaining to make up ground. Clarkson was the latest team to elevate to second place with its one-point advantage over the Big Red, but Cornell’s 12 points sat two full weekends behind the runaway Bobcats with one bad weekend separating a drop to last place thanks to numbers that indicated a team still finding its way towards a 60-minute performance.
“Every coach says they’ll take fast starts and get out to leads,” Schafer said. “I think that if you hang your hat on that, you’re in trouble as a team. You see all kinds of statistics about what a team’s record is if it gets scored on, and you don’t want to be that team that gets scored on and has a hard time mentally working back into the game. Over the course of the year, we tried to install a full 60 (minutes), so that we have to keep plugging away and not get affected by it.
“Early in the year, we got scored on by Harvard, and it was a big game against a big rival – we wanted to win that game so badly. But we learned a little bit by playing BU, which is a great hockey team that scored on us first, that we came back on in the third period.”
Through it all, Cornell was able to tread water with official ties against UMass and Arizona State before the subsequent sweep in the desert, but the Big Red were never the sexy pick to chase down the league leaders. Every weekend saw some other team produce six points and explode to the front of the ECAC standings only to fall backwards within a week, but a reversal of fortune against Princeton brought extra momentum to a team that steadily rode its wave through an overtime win over those same Bobcats.
One weekend later, a four-point stretch against Harvard and Dartmouth got Cornell back inside the national bubble, and the Big Red erased the differential to Clarkson by plowing through the Golden Knights with a 7-2 victory one night after a 5-1 win over St. Lawrence. This past weekend’s trip to RPI and Union continued that stretch with another sweep, to which the 10-2 goal advantage in the Capital District pushed the Big Red to a 22-5 advantage over four different ECAC opponents.
“The hardest part for me was that we scored at RPI, but that team had no quit,” Schafer said, “and Union, too, is a very good team. We saw the success they had over their last 10 games, and they play hard. They compete hard. They have good special teams. That’s a tough place to play. So to come back the next day and bounce back by being ready to play, I was very happy with. I thought [Union] outplayed us, and they took it to us in the last period, which reinforced that we have to learn that it has to be the full 60 minutes.”
There’s now a component of a pennant race in ECAC. Quinnipiac’s overtime game against Cornell in late January was one day after a loss to Colgate, and a loss to St. Lawrence this past weekend combined with the off week for the Connecticut Ice Tournament to create a league race that nobody saw coming. The Bobcats are still eight points ahead, but a game in hand to the Big Red is part of a favorable finish where two of the last three weekends are at home. Brown and Yale visit this weekend before Cornell takes a trip to the North Country, but the last weekend of the season is at Lynah against Union and RPI.
It doesn’t mean Cornell is going to catch Quinnipiac, which plays four of its last five games at home, but the Big Red are making a case that’s difficult to ignore. Their 15-4-4 record is the highest winning percentage away from the top four teams in the PairWise Rankings and includes the lowest number of losses in the nation, but the unfortunate reality surrounding the lower number of nonconference games – an Ivy League staple – means the No. 14 team in the PairWise still has to make up extra ground over the last month.
Given that the CCHA and Atlantic hockey champions will erase the bottom two teams in the top-16, the Big Red know what’s in front – and what’s behind – as the last weeks commence.
“They’re consciously thinking about it,” Schafer said. “We learned our lesson early in the year when we were 4-0 with all of these young guys. We weren’t even that good of a hockey team, but we were fortunate to get off to a fast start. We had all kinds of holes, but they learned their lesson. We thought we were pretty good, and we found out pretty quickly that we weren’t that good. Rankings, winning streaks, they don’t mean much because we learned our lesson the hard way.
“We took it on our chins, and I don’t think these guys are going to make that mistake again.”
