It sure didn’t take long for college hockey to start celebrating over the fallen giant.
For years, the Quinnipiac-established juggernaut ruled ECAC. The Bobcats won Cleary Cup after Cleary Cup and while they didn’t claim a conference championship, trips to the Frozen Four and the first ECAC national championship since Union and Yale’s consecutive titles more than cemented their elite-level status.
As the first month ended, a 3-5 record salivated onlookers who wanted to ignore the 8-2 win over New Hampshire or the 3-0 win over Holy Cross, and not even a sweep over Brown and Yale or a 3-1 win over Cornell stopped the macabre fun of sharpening pitchforks or lighting torches over the grounded giant in Hamden, Conn.
Finally, finally, the mightiest sword in ECAC would stop swinging, and attention would rightly turn towards the megaliths in Hockey East, the Big Ten and the NCHC. A new parity would emerge for the 11 other teams stepping through the fallen idols, and headlines swerved towards other teams.
And then this weekend’s sweep over Princeton happened, and the Bobcats, the team that wouldn’t compete for a conference championship in 2025, opened a six-point lead for first place over Clarkson and Union despite using a couple more out-of-hand games than those other two teams.
The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
“We played well during the Princeton series,” said Bobcats coach Rand Pecknold. “We weren’t perfect, but we played really well. We had good goaltending on both nights, we were very opportunistic, and I thought we were resilient. I liked where our compete was, and we’re still just working and trying to build to get better for March, which is where we took a good step this weekend.”
A good step is an understatement for a team that enters mid-January with the duality of more-modest numbers capable of still ranking among the nation’s best programs. An offense with 3.20 goals per game is better than Providence, Boston College or the high-flying western teams from the Big Ten, and the 2.30 goals allowed, while a hair behind Clarkson for the overall body of work, is right next to the top-ranked Friars while edging the Golden Knights in ECAC-centric games.
Two of the Bobcat scorers – Holy Cross transfer Jack Ricketts and second-year graduate senior Travis Treloar, a former Ohio State product – are within striking range of Brandon Buhr’s goals lead, and Aaron Schwartz, an incumbent recruit in his first year of college hockey, is right behind both with eight goals on the season. Second-year forward Mason Marcellus, meanwhile, is one assist behind Colby MacArthur for the league lead, and both Jeremy Wilmer and Andon Cerbone – a transfer and a Quinnipiac recruit – are among the league’s best point distributors.
“Our biggest strength has been our character,” said Pecknold. “It’s our culture [because] it’s a really good group of guys. The buy-in isn’t all the way there, but we’re getting there. When we’ve played to our identity, we win a lot of our games, and we’ve made progress over the course of the year. We weren’t playing to our identity at all in October, and that’s where we struggled, so we’ve made progress towards our ultimate goal of being great night in and night out, but there’s still work to be done.”
Quinnipiac’s identity was initially thought to hang in limbo among the other ECAC programs because Pecknold struck the chord between homegrown recruits and incoming transfers, but mixing the portal with his own group caused a natural reset after the national championship team graduated and matriculated its players into more long-term careers.
The lone remaining members from that team are few and far between, and the trio of bejeweled Bobcats still on the roster didn’t number many games beyond Victor Czerneckianair’s 40 appearances.
Churning the season forward, though, seemed to bring that full-blown reputation back towards the surface of Quinnipiac’s game. Ricketts, for example, posted the second goal of the 4-2 win over the Tigers with a smartly-timed power play goal in the immediate aftermath of goals by first-year, in-house recruits in Elliott Groenewold and Aaron Schwartz. The next night, Ricketts again scored in the first period before Ryan Smith and Marcellus, two more in-house finds, added insurance goals in the second period.
“You’re always tweaking things and changing things because you have to adapt,” Pecknold noted, “and that’s about trying different kids at center or left wing, different power play units, stuff like that. But my opinion is that our identity is our core, and we’ve won a lot of games over the last 12-15 years by playing to that same identity. It’s nothing crazy or earth-shattering to the way we play, but it’s a battle sometimes. Our kids have to be selfless, and we try to get them to understand that being selfless and defending better gets them to play more offense.”
Nearly everyone circled the wagons on Quinnipiac’s drop-off when the Bobcats struggled out of the gate in October, but there’s now clarity towards the top of the league table as January swings into gear because the Bobcats are once again in the national tournament hunt.
Once left for the middle of the Pairwise Rankings, the No. 15 team is hanging on the bubble with an opportunity to gain spots in the near interim. Its 24 points are eight clear of the first round drop into the single-elimination first round games, and the gap widens even further as programs cycle back into sixth or seventh place despite holding games-in-hand over the first place side.
Nearly everyone has to travel to the M&T Bank Arena to play a team with an absurd 31-3-1 record over the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons, and the 7-4 record this year dropped only a loss to Northeastern beyond the bad weekend against Dartmouth and Harvard.
Colgate and Cornell arrive this weekend for a massive series, and beyond that, Clarkson’s arrival in early February likely seats a table for the Cleary Cup’s home stretch in the aftermath of the CT Ice Tournament’s first round game against UConn – a sneaky big game with Pairwise implications.
“I’m big about controllables,” Pecknold said, “and you don’t control [home ice]. When games happen, let’s handle what’s in front of us, which is a game against Colgate on Friday. I don’t overthink homestands or being on the road because I want to focus on what’s next for that week and where we are right now. That means Colgate on Friday and a quick turnaround against Cornell. We had a great practice [on Monday], and we’re getting better every day, and that’s what we’re going to work on.”
