TMQ: Talking all the changes, major storylines in NCAA hockey during the past decade
By
Jim Connelly and
Paula C. Weston
December 24, 2019
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.
Jim: ... With all but two teams on break this past week, I thought this would be a good time to look back a bit.
For the past week or so, USCHO has been running features that look back at each league over the last decade. It certainly was a pretty wild decade, no doubt.
The seismic shift in the landscape pretty much headlines things for me. The Big Ten was created, the CCHA was demolished and even as we head towards the 2020s, there is still so much uncertainty for the WCHA.
The good news was that college hockey added two teams: Penn State and Arizona State. The better news was that both of those programs were immediately competitive, each qualifying for NCAA tournaments. ...
Paula: As you mentioned, the biggest story was the realignment – and for me, personally, the shift from covering the CCHA to covering Big Ten hockey.
I don’t think that people who weren’t following either the CCHA or WCHA closely really grasp how enormous a paradigm shift that as. I think the reason people pine for the CCHA still or the old WCHA is that each had a couple of Big Ten schools in its league and there was a such a mix of “big” and “small” programs.
It’s a culture shift that is difficult to explain to fans of other leagues. While I am not calling one bit for a return to something similar, there was something unique about the way in which those two leagues were composed, the way in which each conference had a that mix of B1G schools, smaller D-I schools, and schools at which hockey was the only D-I sport. It was part of the foundation of the entire D-I hockey landscape that we enjoy now, one in which fans can rub elbows with coaches at the Frozen Four. I don’t know how much longer this kind of culture will exist in any D-I sport.
Another storyline that tops my list is the rise of ECAC Hockey. The improvement in that league in the past decade has been phenomenal, from the overall top-to-bottom competition to the league’s presence on the national scene.
From 2000 through 2009, just one ECAC team made a Frozen Four appearance, and that was St. Lawrence in 2000. This past decade saw back-to-back ECAC national titles when Yale won in 2013 and Union the following year. Quinnipiac fought Yale for the title in 2013 and returned to the championship game in 2016. Union first appeared in the Frozen Four in 2012, and Harvard returned to the national championship tournament in 2017 after a 23-year absence. In 2016, Harvard’s Jimmy Vesey was the Hobey Baker Award winner.
This reemergence of ECAC hockey is, in my opinion, one of the best stories of the last decade.
Jim: Mentioning the ECAC is a precursor to my next big storyline: the remarkable number of first-time national champions. Yale and Union were half of the quarter of schools that lifted the national championship trophy.
Minnesota Duluth not only won its first back in 2011, but the Bulldogs followed up with two additional titles in 2018 and 2019. Providence also won its first title in 2015.
To put that all in perspective, six of the 10 national titles in the decade were won by team that entered the 10-year period without a national title.
Not too shabby. ...
Read more at: TMQ: Talking all the changes, major storylines in NCAA hockey during the past decade | College Hockey | USCHO.com
