My previous discussion of college hockey have dropped like a rock and this one will probably be no different.
But does anyone care about the death of the CCHA and WCHA? For anyone who doesn’t know, Penn State decided to go to division I with their hockey teams. This gave the Big Ten six members with hockey teams. SO they decided to pull their teams out of the CCHA and WCHA and form a new Big Ten hockey conference (which will of course follow standard numbering conventions by having 6 teams).
It seems pretty obvious that the whole thing is an attempt to bolster the Networks eyeballs by having more than 12 days year when people turn it on. College Hockey revenue has always been puny, with only local homemade networks and the frozen four showing any at all.
As a fan of Michigan, I love the fact that I will be able to watch games now and then. But a 6 team league just seems weird these days. And the biggest wonder will be if the recruiting landscape gets changed. Before Everybody was on equal footing, with 0 exposure for all. But now with one conference having regular TV time, you gotta wonder if that is going to influence some kids recruiting. Not like UM was a long time member of the CCHA anyway, but seeing any tradition die always seems a little wrong.
I also wonder if there is a lure being tossed Notre Dame’s way. If they can get any added value for the network with Hockey, Going all in with the Big Ten might seem a bit more tempting.
College hockey conferences don’t seem anywhere near as set in stone as football/basketball conferences are (or, these days, were). Half of Atlantic Hockey’s membership, for example, joined in the last four years. College Hockey America disappeared in 2010, unnoticed by just about all.
Still, it is a big shift in college hockey. Penn State got a $80+ million gift from Terry Pegula to jumpstart their hockey program, and we’ll see if the big money gets big results.
Here are my rambling thoughts on the matter. I’m a Gophers fan and I’m not thrilled at all to see the BTHC. I don’t know many fans who do support the Big Ten in hockey. I loved the fact that the Gophers were pretty much the biggest rival of 6 WCHA teams, even if the play hasn’t backed it up for the last few years. The College Hockey Showcase provided annual games against the two CCHA/B10 teams that mattered. (OK, the one that mattered plus MSU:D). I think the domino response to the announcement is a shame. And on top of it all, Huntsville still hasn’t found a conference. The WCHA was filled with tradition, dating back to the 1950s. Now the Minnesota schools are going to be split between three conferences.
Since the Gophers have typically had 75% or more of their games televised, the BTN isn’t going to be as big of a draw for them. It may only be FSN, but considering the fact that the Gopher recruiting base is Minnesota, having more than a regional network isn’t really necessary for recruiting purposes. To add to that, the BTN has been broadcasting games anyway. It’s not as if you need a Big Ten conference to broadcast.
Thirty years is definitely nothing to sneeze at.
The hockey situation is what makes me think that Notre Dame is going to be going all in on the Big Ten soon. Otherwise, I think they would have already joined the NCHC. I suspect that they were waiting to see what would happen in other sports, and now that the Big East is falling apart, jumping to a stable conference would be in their interest.
Fluid conference membership is a fact of life in other sports, outside of the few major conferences. The reason that the CHA went largely unnoticed was because it was really just a way for the independents to get an autobid to the NCAA tournament. The teams had nothing in common, and jumped to other conferences as soon as they got the chance. The shakeup in the WCHA and the CCHA is much more visible. Of course, the CCHA has flat out disappeared as a conference, and the WCHA has lost the rest of its charter members (except for Michigan Tech) as well as two teams that have been members since the 1960s.
I didn’t know college hockey was a draw at all, to be honest. I thought it was down there with NCAA. Here in Ontario, it tends to go NHL, OHL, QMJHL, AHL, and others after that.
College hockey is fairly big in Minnesota, Michigan, and New England. And that’s about it. The University of Minnesota makes several million dollars a year on it. There are two programs in Alaska, three in Colorado, one in Alabama, and a handful in other midwestern states. The US doesn’t have much of a junior system, so the NCAA really takes the place of the major juniors. Top level Canadian junior hockey is generally considered to be superior hockey to the NCAA, but the NCAA has been improving as of late. Most of the top college players have been drafted by NHL teams, which treat the colleges as if they’re junior programs. This means that players can and do jump to the NHL, even midseason. (This can’t happen in other NCAA sports). It’s also worth bearing in mind that the NCAA is strictly amateur and any player who has played major junior is ineligible to play college hockey.
As I understand it, the Big Ten has a “no affiliates” policy. If a university plays one Big Ten sport, it must play in the Big Ten for all sports that the school offers. I really don’t see the Big Ten changing that for hockey, especially since the gossip is that Wisconsin’s push for the BTHC was that Barry Alvarez was sick of explaining to boosters that there’s really no shame in losing to North Dakota, Duluth, or Denver in hockey.
The Broncos best outcome would be to get in to the NCHC. I suspect the WCHA may be more likely though.
This is a good thread and the discussion so far has been first rate.
I think the problem with college hockey is that it has been treated like a bastard stepchild by the AD’s in the Big 10 which is the conference that has the best chance of jump-starting the sport to turn it into a revenue generator. The Big 10 network can go a long way to make that happen.
I mentioned this in an earlier thread but I thought it would be good for the Big 10 to think outside the box and invite Bowling Green, Western Michigan and Miami of Ohio to play in a B10 conference. What the hell, invite AL Birmingham and Omaha and make a fun day of it. Who get’s hurt by that (except any player at Birmingham that is actually trying to go to class).
I’m not going to cry big tears about the CCHA. It was a cobbled together conference that served a purpose but probably that day has passed. Two Alaska teams in the CCHA? A nice accommodation for them but not really a practical arrangement.
Anyway if the B10 wants to establish a hockey conference and is willing to commit to it, I’m all for it. Penn State should have had a D1 team long ago. Maybe this will inspire some other B10 teams like Illinois or Indiana to start a D1 hockey program.
To antonio107:
College hockey in the US is very different than in Canada. The road to the NHL in Canada goes through the Junior leagues. There is good Junior hockey in the US but it is too diluted and has no real following. College hockey does have a following and a lot of good players will go to a D1 school or even a D3 school (there is no D2) to get a free education and get a good look from the NHL scouts. Canadian college hockey is mainly for guys that have accepted the fact that they will not make the NHL and want to get an education. There is a different mindset. If you go through the NHL rosters you see guys that have played college hockey in the US and it is a pretty impressive list. In fact, a lot of Canadians that want a scholarship and have aspirations of playing in the NHL will play college hockey in the US.
College hockey in the US is full of guys that are 20 years old when they are freshman. They may have played a year or two in the Junior leagues. Or, they may have been in an eastern prep school, done a PG year (5th year of high school), played a year in the Junior leagues and then took a college scholarship. Coaches love those guys. They are more mature (which is asking a lot of a hockey player), more developed and they only have to babysit them for one year until they can legally go into the bars.
President Johnny Gentle, thanks for the posts. I’m a casual Gophers fan (born in MN, but grew up in WI). The past few years have seen more WCHA games at large shown on the FSN, but I’ve traditionally followed by just checking the box scores on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Will the Gophers play a home & home with UND, at least that you know of? I’ll really miss being the team that everyone else in the conference wanted to beat.
I was talking to a dude over the weekend who was a former Omaha player. And he was talking about rumors that now that the Big Ten thinks there is money in Hockey that Nebraska(Lincoln) may pretty much just take Omaha’s team soon for a division one of their own. Not something I personally know anything about, but it seems a possibility that Nebraska might want in.
A couple minor nitpicks: Huntsville, not Birmingham, though I often slip and make the same mistake. Also, the two Alaska schools were separated (Anchorage in the WCHA, Fairbanks in the CCHA), although both will now be in the WCHA. Otherwise, nice post, and you were able to make the juniors/college comparison much more coherently than I was.
I know what you mean. It’s the only sport where I got to cheer for the Yankees/Cowboys of the league. Even in down years, opposing teams are always revved up to play the Gophers. When you add the fact that players at the four other Minnesota schools often grew up wanting to play for the Gophers, but may not have been recruited by them, there was an additional factor to those games.
Unfortunately, I live out of state and no longer get FSN, so I see very few games now. I’ve had to look to box scores myself much more often as of late.
Playing UND is unfortunately out of the question, until they change their mascot. U policy forbids them from playing any non-conference games against schools with mascots deemed offensive by the NCAA. Last session, North Dakota passed a law saying UND had to keep the Sioux name and logo. However, the NCAA has since reiterated that UND will be unable to host any NCAA tournament games until they change, so that law is likely to be repealed this winter, and the university should change in the next year or two. Hopefully this is all done by 2013, and the rivalry can continue.
As a Gopher fan, I don’t want to lose that rivalry or the rivalry with Duluth, since both are older than I am. St. Cloud is fairly strong as well this point. The rivalries with Mankato and Bemidji are too new for me to have grown attached to them, so that doesn’t bug me quite so much. I am pleased that the historic rivalry with Michigan will get resurrected (they’ve played some classic tournament games against each other in the last couple decades), but MSU has barely been on my radar, and OSU is a complete non-entity in hockey.
I’ve heard that rumor as well. The story as I received it is that the Lincoln administration doesn’t like the fact that Omaha brought their program up to D1. In order to show up UNO in the one sport where Omaha is clearly better, they’d like to start a hockey team.
There are also a lot of rumblings about Illinois promoting their club team to varsity status. They have problems with the arena though, as it’s 80 years old and seats 2000. By way of comparison, the smallest Big Ten arena will be at MSU, which seats approximately 6400. The PSU arena will apparently be in the 6000-8000 range.
In addition, supposedly one other unidentified Big Ten school has contacted the NCAA about starting a varsity team, but that might have been Nebraska.
It seems to me that if Illinois can afford a new ice arena they aren’t trying very hard. I’ll use as a comparison the Berkshire School, a prep school in western Massachusetts. Berkshire is pretty much out in the middle of nowhere. Of course there are small towns in the surrounding area but the closest real cites are Albany, NY and Springfield, MA and are 60 miles away in opposite directions. Now look at the facility they have constructed:
Now this is a friggin’ private high school. Of course it was built with money from the deep pockets of a benefactor but how they sustain the thing is a mystery to me. There can’t be a lot of youth hockey programs, house leagues, adult leagues and figure skating clubs renting the ice time. It’s just too rural. (Maybe there are and I just don’t know it.)
With the size of the Illinois alumni I find it hard to believe they can’t raise the money for an arena. Again, I don’t think they are trying very hard and they could probably get the Champaign community involved to mitigate the cost of maintaining it.
More likely movement: Saint Cloud and WMU invited to NCHC. This is pretty much where both teams wanted to land, so chances of rejection are slim IMO. This would leave the new look WCHA with 8 teams, and leaves 2 schools from the CCHA with no home yet. There are some interesting things related to this, some of which the article gets into.
Notre Dame may have rejected the NCHC. I suppose they could be headed to Atlantic Hockey, but competition will be much greater in the NCHC. ND sees themselves as an emerging national power, and they want to play with other powers. Hockey East is probably drooling right now, but I think the NCHC is a stronger conference top to bottom. Upshot: despite what national football commentators think, I continue to think ND is headed to the Big 10 soon.
Bowling Green is in serious trouble. They have an invite to the WCHA, but really wanted the NCHC. The BGSU program was threatened a few years back. WCHA travel costs will be significantly higher than CCHA costs were. Bowling Green make make overtures to Hockey East, but I’m not sure that the BGSU profile over the last couple decades makes them appealing. Their best conference finish since 1995 was 5th, and they haven’t made the NCAA tournament since 1990. I think that Atlantic Hockey would be the best place they could land, since travel costs will be lower than the WCHA and they would presumably be more competitive. This is a program that has a national championship after all. Whether AH would take them is another thing. AH sits at 12 members, do they want to go to 13?
Whither Huntsville? UAH is the lone program still having problems with the CHA split. They need a conference, or they’ll die. An obvious solution is a pairing with Bowling Green, since that would leave any conference with a realistic chance of taking the pair with an even number of schools, which is better for scheduling purposes. Of course, this would mean that the AH would have to grow to 14. I’m not sure that this happens.
Predictions: When the dust settles, Notre Dame is in the Big 10 (in all sports) and BGSU and UAH join the WCHA, despite the travel costs.
This whole thing is a travesty. It’s going to end up deeply hurting some of the historically best teams in the nation and killing off a number of small or fledgling programs. The Big Ten made a grab for money but it may end up killing the Golden Goose. And I say this as a Wisconsin grad.
College hockey is a tough sell. The Big Ten has two teams that draw - Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ohio State has 40,000 students and Lord knows how many alum within an hour of the rink but draws less than 4,000 to a stadium that holds 17,500. Michigan does a little better but plays in a barn that is almost 100 years old. Are they prepared to spend tens of millions on a new stadium when they only draw 5,000 a game? Penn State will have a new team and arena thanks to a wealthy donor, but are they going to have fans? There is no guarantee. They will at first, but PSU will get drubbed by the established schools for years. On either side (and four hours away) are the Penguins and the Flyers. Are those fans going to make the long drive to see a lesser product? I doubt it. Look at PSU’s basketball program. They can’t sell tickets for that, and they have top ten teams coming in all the time. Of all the Big Ten hockey schools, only Michigan made the NCAA tourney last year.
The new NCHC is loaded with talent, but only North Dakota is a reliable crowd, due to their unique circumstance of being the only game in town. DU and CC do pretty well, but a good part of their crowds are alums of the visiting teams. The Wisconsin Alumni Association in Denver rents out a house on DU’s campus and the same for CC when the Badgers come to play, and put on a beer and brat fest before the games. Probably 20% of the crowd is Badger fans. The same thing happens with Minnesota. Miami? Minnesota-Duluth? Not so much.
Does anyone really think that Ferris State and Northern Michigan are going to survive? What percentage of their athletic department budget will taking 50 people to Fairbanks and Anchorage every year eat up?
I’ve looked at it a long time, and the only thing I see happening is for six or seven schools to drop their hockey programs pretty quickly. The new NCHC will struggle but survive, but will never be as strong as the old WCHA. The BTHC will add a little money for the Big Ten Network, but it isn’t going to do anything to expand the sport.
I find it an odd thing. I am a college hockey fan, having gone to Cornell, and I think it would make sense for all the Big Ten teams to be in the same conference…perhaps consolidate all to the CCHA, since only Minnesota and Wisconsin are in the WCHA, but the 6 team conference is a bit odd.
I don’t see why they couldn’t do both. Cornell, for instance, is in the ECAC (well, ECAC Hockey officially now), but all six of the Ivy League schools with D1 hockey programs play in the ECAC, with six other non-Ivy schools. While the conference championship is still WAY more important than the Ivy title, the Ivy title is still awarded each year, and is based solely on the Ivy record. I don’t see why the Big Ten couldn’t do something similar.
Also fairly big at the University of Wisconsin; the program has traditionally been well-supported by fans and alumni (as other posters have noted), and has produced a number of NHL stars, including Chris Chelios and Dany Heatley. When I was attending UW in the 1980s, the hockey program was the only major athletic team we had which was any good (the football and basketball programs were both in sustained slumps).
I live in Wisconsin, so I’m well aware that the UW team is popular in Madison. By no means am I trying to belittle the program. However I’ve also lived in Minnesota and Michigan, and Wisconsin has nothing on either state in the popularity of hockey. In Wisconsin, the Badgers are popular. Sort of. I find discussion of college sports is almost exclusively related to Badgers football and basketball. Things are different in Madison, but it’s not a state wide thing. Wisconsin has four D1 universities and one D1 hockey program. Minnesota has one D1 university and five D1 hockey programs (those numbers are correct!). Michigan has seven universities and seven hockey teams. Hockey permeates the other states to a much greater extent. Wisconsin isn’t helped by the fact that it doesn’t have an NHL team either.
To no one’s surprise, both Western and St. Cloud accept the invites to the NCHC.
I agree with you mostly. Michigan and Michigan State were in the WCHA until the early 1980s when they left for competitive reasons. Despite the prominence of Wolverine hockey over the last 20 years, they were in a prolonged slump at the time, having qualified for the NCAA tournament once between the mid 1960s and early 1990s. While the four were in the same conference, they did have an annual “Big Ten Championship”.
Also, for the last 20 or so years, they played the College Hockey Showcase at Thanksgiving. That could have been turned into a Big Ten tournament fairly easily.
The only thing I disagree with is moving the Gophers and Badgers, since the Gophers had a number of long-time rivalries in the WCHA, some of which are now uncertain to continue.
Football’s got nothing on the hockey moves! Apparently Canisius, Mercyhurst, Niagara, and Robert Morris all want out of AH, because of scholarship limits. Rumor says they’re in negotiations with the WCHA. Additionally, the NCHC may not be done, with a possible invite to Mankato coming soon. There seem to be rumblings that Bemidji would go with, meaning that all 4 non-Twin Cities hockey schools would be in the NCHC. These moves would mean that the WCHA would have 2 teams in the Alaska time zone. Every other team would be in the Eastern time zone, unless Hunstville joins. Some “Western” league!
I’ve no idea if this thread can stay revived, but some of the final bricks are starting to fall into place.
Bowling Green to WCHA and Notre Dame to Hockey East. I was wrong on the second one. I think that this is bad in the long term for ND, since the competition is tougher in the NCHC.
Huntsville is still without a home.
On a brighter note, the season’s opening this weekend! Well, technically, Lake Superior swept Huntsville last weekend, but most of the games played were exhibition games against Canadian college teams and the US U-18 team.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the Gophers season. A 4th straight season missing the NCAA tournament would be devastating however. They haven’t missed 4 straight years since the 1960s, and only four teams made each of those tournaments.
They shut out British Columbia 3-0 on Sunday, but recent problems seemed to pop up again. In particular, they outshot UBC 44-10, and one of the goals was an empty netter. They were also 0 for 5 on the power play. Their defensive play has been acceptable to great recently, but they haven’t been able to consistently score. Hopefully, they can actually finish this season.