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: Hearty happy Tuesday to you all, and especially happy week to my cohost Paula, who I hope dealt with significantly less stomach flu than the Rubin house possessed. I’m not going to lie – I might never give ever getting that sick a second chance, but I’ll shoutout my wife, who picked up significant slack for me despite also being laid out with the same norovirus. While I was barely standing upright and knee-knocking my way down a hallway, she somehow managed to parent both kids despite getting sick in the hours after I caught whatever the kids have.

On to more pressing needs.

It’s Tuesday, but we’re recording this for consumption on Monday. Normally that doesn’t matter, but this Monday features the first round of the Beanpot, an annual exercise in neighborhood parochialism for those of us who grew up in the Boston area. It’s a highlight of the year for all of us around these parts, but I think I’ve learned how to appreciate it more and more in the years following the pandemic.

Before I kick it over, I want to identify my own personal thoughts on the Beanpot. About 10 years ago, I called it overrated because I felt rising powers in college hockey took away from the fallen prestige of a “local tournament.” The four schools weren’t as good as other New England powerhouses, so the Beanpot, to me, was really damaged in its reputation for the first time.

It’s since roared back to life, and I’d argue that this tournament now features three of the best teams in the country in Boston College, Boston University and Northeastern, which transformed its identity from Beanpot also-ran by winning countless trophies over the last decade. Harvard, the lone ECAC entry, is arguably the most historic team in college hockey.

Has there ever been a field like this? I think the GLI comes to mind, but I believe that tournament rotated its fourth spot before Michigan ceased its participation in the post-COVID life.

Paula: There are two oh-so-Boston-centric things that I love about your opening, Dan.

The first is downplaying the Beanpot as “neighborhood parochialism” and a bit about how disillusioned you were with it a decade ago, about how it wasn’t as relevant and yada yada yada.

The second is immediately smashing that to pieces with, “Isn’t this the best field in the history of any college hockey event, ever?!”

I’m paraphrasing that second one, of course. And I’m laughing with you, not at you.

Your opening reminds of the long-ago, east-west college hockey discussions – when there were distinct styles between the different conferences and geographic delineations – in which it was apparent that one of the things that separates college hockey fans is not only geography but perceptions of space and time.

I remember a conversation I had with Jimmy Connelly back in the day, when he was talking about the long drive from Boston to Alfond Arena, and I was like, “Isn’t that just about four hours?” To him, that trip felt transcontinental. From my perspective, it was the day trip that I took on the regular from Columbus to East Lansing and back to cover a single game.

But I digress – or do I?

The Beanpot is a focal point in an area that is hyper focused on college hockey. There are 11 men’s Division I hockey programs in Massachusetts and not one of them more than two hours from Boston – if they aren’t in Boston or the greater Boston metro area already.

Of the seven D-I hockey programs in Michigan, for example, the closest geographically are Michigan and Michigan State, about an hour’s drive apart. But if Michigan Tech were to play Michigan and Huskies fans wanted to make that drive from Houghton to Ann Arbor, they’d be on the road for at least 8.5 hours – without ever having left the state.

So to answer your question, Dan, there is no comparison to the Beanpot. Anywhere. Ever.

What makes this year’s Beanpot so special is everything that you hit on about the current participants. While I’d argue that Yale may have something to say about your Harvard claims, there is no denying how good Hockey East is this season and how deep the league is.

The Eagles received 48 of a possible 50 votes for first place in this week’s USCHO poll, and deservedly so. Boston College has shut out its last two consecutive opponents – one of which is Boston University – and the Eagles have three shutouts in their last five games. They look like national contenders.

The Terriers rebounded from a 2-0 loss to the Eagles Jan. 25 with a statement 7-2 win over New Hampshire Jan. 31, and BU is 5-2-0 in the new year. Again, both of those losses were to BC.

Northeastern has losses to Maine and Merrimack in its last two games but with 17 conference points is only five behind Providence, the team in fourth place in Hockey East and the No. 7 team in the country.

Harvard’s season is uneven and the Crimson are 4-6-0 since Jan. 1, but I take your point about what that program means to college hockey and especially locally to Boston – although I suspect that Yale may have a legitimate beef with you about part of your claim.

Dan: Either Yale or Cornell, which I know would feel the horrid feeling of salt in the Big Red wounds from this year.

The preseason No. 1 team in the ECAC is currently hanging around .500 overall with an 8-7-6 record, but the alarming 21-point performance to this point is well under where I thought they’d wind up when I slotted them into the top spot in my prediction. Bad luck, a hangover from last year’s championship season, whatever we want to call it, nearly every metric is currently underperforming. It doesn’t mean Cornell won’t go on a run, but I also thought the Big Red would contend for a top seed in the national tournament. Unfortunately, the breaks in ECAC are also dictating that nobody’s getting one of those.

I’m not really great at calling teams “disappointments” because I’m not in the locker room and don’t see the same film as the coaches. I don’t break things down with the team or understand why puck luck hasn’t broken in any one team’s direction, so in lieu of that, I’d like to switch gears to teams that we think might run the gauntlet and win their conference championship. I think Cornell is a prime example of a team nobody wants to see in the ECAC postseason.

Then again – and here comes my Boston-Jungian duality or something – I don’t know if such a team exists in some leagues. I could conceivably picture any team running the table in the Big Ten, and Hockey East is so deep that Northeastern is the No. 9 seed. Both the Huskies and Wisconsin are under .500 but could win their respective leagues. Maybe a team like Bemidji State is worth a look in the CCHA, and AIC is always lurking for me in Atlantic Hockey, where the Yellow Jackets and RIT are currently in ninth and 10th in the league standings.

Paula: Okay, I’ll play. I’ll start with the league I cover and know the best.

Michigan State has six games left and if they win out, no one can reach them. Two points behind the Spartans, the Golden Gophers will need Michigan State to stumble and then (probably also) win out to take the regular-season title.

After that, it gets trickier. I do not think that any team in the Big Ten can capture the regular season title simply because those top two teams are so, so good – and the rest of the field is much further behind in points. For example, Ohio State is 12 points out of first place and even though the Buckeyes have two games in hand on both the Spartans and Golden Gophers, if the Buckeyes manage to win their final eight games, they’d still need Michigan State to stumble quite a little bit.

The current bottom two B1G teams, Penn State and Notre Dame, can each finish no higher than third place and each would need an awful lot of help to get even that far.

What I find interesting about the Big Ten now is that if the season were to end today, both the Spartans and Gophers would be No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament and both Ohio State and Michigan would be in. Right now, too, Wisconsin sits at No. 17 in the PWR and can, theoretically, play themselves into the tourney. Even Penn State – which was way down in the PWR for the first half – is now at No. 20.

It’s a deep league, and in the conference playoffs, absolutely anything can happen.

A quick look at the NCHC is interesting in a very specific way: only one team in that conference, Miami, has been mathematically eliminated from capturing the regular season title. That doesn’t mean that just anyone else has a chance, but it does give you an idea of how deep that league is, too.

Western Michigan and Arizona State are each tied for 34 points at the top of the NCHC conference standings and each has 11 wins, but the Broncos have two games in hand on the Sun Devils, and Arizona State hosts Western Feb. 21-22. ASU is 6-2-0 in league games in January and WMU is 5-1-0 in conference in that span. It’s impossible for me to pick, but given the games in hand, I’d go with Western.

With 30 points, Omaha’s still in the mix. In addition to needing the teams ahead of them to stumble, though, the Mavericks have series remaining with both the Broncos and Sun Devils. It’s a big hill to climb.

With 25 points, I don’t see North Dakota catching either front-runner, nor do I see Denver – a point behind the Fighting Hawks – doing so. That has a whole lot less to do with the Fighting Hawks and Pioneers than it does with how strong the NCHC is.

In Atlantic Hockey, what interesting positions both Holy Cross and Bentley find themselves in. Even though Sacred Heart is in first place with 25 points, both teams have games in hand on the Pioneers and – mathematically speaking – the Crusaders or Falcons can take the conference title by winning out. My money’s on Holy Cross, and I’m sorry that such an outcome would come at the expense of your Falcons, Dan, as the two teams meet Feb. 20.

My dark horse in the CCHA is third-place Michigan Tech, with two games in hand on both Bowling Green and first-place Minnesota State. The ECAC is so tight that I don’t know how to call it other than to say that Quinnipiac has only lost two games in the second half, both losses to Hockey East teams.

Speaking Hockey East, while my sentimental favorite is Maine, I saw the way those Boston College kids were playing in the World Juniors and I know how good the rest of that team is. Besides, I love the way that Jacob Fowler has played in net this season. If his recent injury is day-to-day and not very serious, Fowler can play the Eagles all the way to a national championship.

And that leads me to a question, Dan: What end-of-season predictions of a national nature are you willing to make now? Got a favorite for the national title? Got favorites for the Hobey and Richter awards?

Dan: If I’m looking strictly out east, I find it difficult to pick against anyone other than Jacob Fowler. The second-year backstop was a finalist during last year’s rookie campaign, but he’s near or at the top of the nation in most goaltending categories for the 2024-2025 campaign. Through 1,300 minutes, he’s posted a 1.63 goals against average with a .938 save percentage and 17 wins. His six shutouts lead the nation, but my one complaint is that he’s rarely tasked with needing to do much for the No. 1 team in the nation. His 528 saves are well south of other goalies with similar bona fides. Even so, he’s got my vote if I had a vote.

The biggest thing that separates Fowler is how much he’s played on the ice, though. I like Ryan Manzella as a freshman sensation for Michigan Tech, but he hasn’t played more than 400 minutes of hockey. Alex Tracy has 1,700 minutes and posted more saves for his junior year, but Fowler’s played a brutal schedule. Albin Boija is an interesting prospect at Maine, but he lost head-to-head to Fowler and is juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust enough behind his counterpart to separate the vote for me.

If I’m looking for a dark horse, I honestly love watching Conor Hasley at Bentley, but his five shutouts were tempered by a bad game against Holy Cross a couple of weeks ago. On the season-long performance, Bentley also isn’t at BC’s level on the national level, so it might take Hasley facing Fowler in the national tournament…or at least make my head explode with that one because the Bentley broadcaster and BC writer/podcaster in me wouldn’t handle it.

As for the Hobey Baker Award, I don’t know if there’s a legitimate pull-away winner from this year’s crop. Last year felt like Macklin Celebrini’s year – though BC people contend that Cutter Gauthier deserved the trophy – and there really isn’t one guy that feels like that odds-on winner for this season. Ryan Leonard is obviously the eastern favorite at BC, but the nation’s leading scorer has to contend with players like Isaac Howard, Jack Devine, Zeev Buium, and teammate Gabe Perreault. And that doesn’t even touch the possible candidacy of a Jimmy Snuggerud.

Looking globally, I don’t have a favorite for the national champion. I suppose I’d be better suited for a odds-related bet discussion on USCHO Edge, but much, for me, depends on what I see in the conference tournament when the benches shorten and the games get a little bit more and more intense. Too many times, we’ve seen the best “team” lose its edge in the national tournament because of the wrong gameplan against the wrong team.

Last point. Here’s the only thing I’m hammering home, and if anyone wants to claim my eastern bias on this one, I’m okay with it. David Berard deserves the Spencer Penrose Award. What he’s done at Stonehill is nothing short of magnificent. He took a team hoisted onto the Division I ranks and converted its one-win campaign into a 10-win program that beat a nationally-ranked UMass Lowell program. I don’t think anyone understands how difficult that job looked, but he turned the Skyhawks into a Division I team.

Repeat: a Division I team.

I know the players who were there last year gave that team their hearts and souls, but Berard’s takeover gave them some results. That’s awesome.

Paula: I see your Eastern bias and raise it with decades spent covering hockey in the “West” – which is anything on this side of the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, as I understand it.

Augustana began the season with a 4-1 win over North Dakota, followed that two weeks later with a sweep of Omaha, is 16-7-3 overall and 8-3-1 in the Vikings’ inaugural CCHA season. I respect what Berard has done at Stonehill, but if we’re looking at similar criteria, my pick would be Garrett Raboin.

Honestly, I think a very strong case can be made for several coaches, but I do think that Adam Nightingale is a strong frontrunner. Yes, he has the resources of a Big Ten school at his disposal, but he and his staff have done some amazing rebuilding in pretty short order.

In 2021-22, the year before Nightingale took over, the Spartans had eight total wins and six in the Big Ten. A season later, they were out of the cellar with an 18-18-2 overall record (10-12-2 B1G) and last season, Michigan State won its first regular-season championship since 2001, their first Big Ten tournament championship since 2006, and the Spartans were a game away from returning to the Frozen Four for the first time since 2007 – in their first NCAA tournament appearance since 2012.

Like you, I am a huge proponent of “small” programs and those without significant resources, but it’s hard to ignore what Nightingale and his staff are doing in East Lansing.