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.
Ed: Dan, as USCHO’s ECAC Hockey beat writer, I don’t need to tell you how much coaches of the six Ivy League teams dislike being limited to 29 NCAA games each season. Those teams end up beginning play about a month or more behind everyone else.
You might think that would mean shaking off some rust or being a little sloppy in that first weekend. I know I did.
But for two teams, this past weekend got off to a terrific start. Dartmouth had a conference win over Harvard and a non-league win over a Stonehill team that had blanked St. Lawrence, 4-0, on Friday.
And then there’s Cornell.
Some intrepid – and prescient – media member or coach has been voting the Big Red No. 1 in the USCHO men’s D-I hockey poll since preseason. You’ve sworn to us up and down that it wasn’t you (though we haven’t resorted to waterboarding to try to get you to confess). Nevertheless, you were exactly right about Cornell when we looked at odds for Friday’s game at Lynah Rink against North Dakota on our USCHO Edge podcast.
Does the sweep of the Fighting Hawks now bring some overdue respect to No. 6 Cornell in Mike Schafer’s swan song season?
Dan: I remain committed that I had Denver at No. 1 in this week’s poll, so my affiliations to the eastern leagues cannot be used against me in any court of public opinion. That’s right folks – I’m not even voting for Boston College or Bentley!
Look, I think plenty among us don’t want to admit that Ivy League schools aren’t as good as “other” college hockey programs because their later start and lower number of games make them a little more susceptible to missed storylines. By the time we would have talked about Cornell’s first game, for example, we’ve already discussed North Dakota’s titan series against Boston University while weighing Boston College’s games against St. Cloud State. We have trends in every league, including the ECAC, and we’re able to chart those trends. Going backwards to intersect that debate with the season debut of teams that the majority of college hockey folks – including people from out east – isn’t a popular thing to do. I totally get it.
It’s disrespectful to the Ivy League teams to look at them as nothing more than “teams that start the season late, and that’s weird” because, frankly, they’re good hockey teams. Harvard and Princeton won the ECAC championship over the last decade, and Dartmouth finished fourth in last year’s league. Yale is a former national champion that once routinely ranked No. 1 in the nation. Brown women’s hockey was the original eastern powerhouse and is ranked again for the first time in nearly 20 years after starting 5-0-0, and I can’t count the number of times the men’s team felt like it was getting the hang of things (shoutout the 2019 triple-overtime game that I called with my brother). Frankly put, Cornell beating and sweeping North Dakota at home shouldn’t surprise anyone for the factors involved with the team, and we should respect the defending league champion for its strength.
Maybe it’s idealistic, but college hockey is more than the same seven teams. That’s something we learned this weekend, and I’m excited to see if other teams can jump off the page and surprise us over the next couple of months. Maybe it’s in the spirit of Election Day (covers up as cabbage is thrown at me), but let’s look down ballot at some of our matchups. I want to start out west with the CCHA. Two one-goal games between Minnesota State and Bemidji State. We knew they’d be low scoring, but how refreshing is it to watch a pair of defensive teams match up with one another?
Ed: My vote has also been for Denver all along. This week 46 voters agree with you and me with the other first-place vote going to a deserving Golden Gophers squad. More on them in a moment.
But back to the CCHA. The scoreboard might look like it was a defensive game between Bemidji and Minnesota State in the Beavers’ 1-0 win, but Tom Serratore’s charges put up 44 shots on Mavericks goaltender Alex Tracy – hardly the smothering sort of defense Minnesota State was known for in the Dryden McKay days of facing a dozen shots in a game. But the split on the weekend does suggest to me that the CCHA is just as wide open as the preseason coaches poll in that league. That had these two teams, along with St. Thomas and Michigan Tech, getting first place votes.
Sometimes you get defensive games from teams you don’t expect. Also referring back to last Friday’s USCHO Edge episode, we looked at an over/under of 6.5 goals in Friday’s Penn State at Minnesota tilt, which ended 3-1 Gophers. Saturday’s 1-0 win by Minnesota was even more remarkable. Penn State held Minnesota to just 12 shots on goal, but it would be Jimmy Clark’s deflection in the high slot of Luke Mittelstadt’s shot from the point that resulted in the game’s only tally. The shutout by grad student transfer Liam Soulière must have been especially sweet for him against his former team.
Things are also feeling a little more wide open to me in the Big Ten. Minnesota is off to a torrid start, Michigan made some noise in its sweep of Boston University, and defending champion Michigan State is certainly going to be in that conversation.
I would have expected the other team in the mix to be Wisconsin after the stellar first campaign under Mike Hastings, but the Badgers have stumbled out of the gate. They may have gotten some much needed “sunshine” (as Hastings told Todd D. Milewski of Badger Extra) with a 2-1 win on Saturday at Notre Dame.
The real surprise in the Big Ten has to be Ohio State. The No. 13 Buckeyes are 7-0-1 with five points taken at Wisconsin as their only Big Ten results. It hasn’t been the toughest schedule, but the good start has made poll voters notice Steve Rohlik’s team.
Back to our election day down ballot analysis. There are a few other teams out there with better-than-expected starts. Who do you put in that category thus far?
Dan: It’s really been a pleasant October surprise to see the resurgence within the UMass Lowell program this year. The 5-1 team is up to No. 17 nationally in this week’s poll – passing UMass for good measure – and while nothing’s been perfect, the wins are in games that were ultimately lost during last year’s inconsistency.
Sure, the wins over Colgate mirrored the wins from last season, and the split against Minnesota-Duluth produced the same results as the Alaska-Anchorage split from the trip to the Great White North, but the wins over Holy Cross and Merrimack pushed this team marginally ahead of last year’s home-and-home against UConn. I didn’t feel like Lowell overpowered either team over the past couple of weeks, but coming from behind to beat Holy Cross in Worcester is sneaky tough because that rink’s a tough place to play. Ditto for going to Merrimack.
I’m a little excited to see how this team fares at BU on Friday. I kind of wish the Friday game was at home to generate some momentum into Saturday, but a win at Agganis places a ton of value on the return trip to Tsongas. It’s probably a higher gamble, but the payout could be worth it…and I don’t mean that from our USCHO Edge podcast perspective.
Also, quick shoutout for Lowell’s win over Duluth on Bluey Night. It’s an awesome show. My kids love it, and I’m pretty sure I love it more.
There was a big part of me that wanted to talk about Bentley there, but I figured I’d leave the early season surprise in Atlantic Hockey to you. You know who I like…who’s your third-party candidate from the AHA?
Ed: Bentley’s home-and-home sweep over preseason coaches pick Sacred Heart certainly caught my attention. Overall, the Falcons’ record doesn’t appear all that remarkable, but they never trailed against Sacred Heart, and now have to be in the conversation for the top four in the conference. I’ve used the phrase “wide open” twice already, but that’s what AHA is feeling like to me. (Might as well throw in the word parity here; it wouldn’t be TMQ without it.)
The other team that should be on everyone’s AHA watch list is Niagara. They’re loaded with offensive weapons this season and are the only Atlantic Hockey team to receive votes this week in the USCHO poll.
Our whirlwind tour around college hockey wouldn’t be complete without a look at the independents. With Augustana moving into the CCHA ahead of schedule, and Arizona State joining the NCHC, we’re left with just five unaffiliated teams this season. While all five are below .500, there have been some significant upsets. I look at Lindenwood’s defeat of Wisconsin (though that might not look as impressive now), LIU over Notre Dame, and Stonehill’s defeat of Merrimack, Lake Superior State, and the 4-0 shutout of St. Lawrence last weekend.
Lindenwood’s Bill Muckalt and Stonehill’s David Berard have engineered some quick turnarounds at their programs. Stonehill has already surpassed its two wins last season (Lindenwood and Assumption). Lindenwood had just six victories in 2023-24, and three of those were against Stonehill.
Thirteen Stonehill players entered the transfer portal at the end of the last season. Five reconsidered after Berard was hired, and five more key players came in via the portal.
The right bench boss sure makes a difference.
Dan: Look, I’ll say this – David Berard is doing Herculean work at Stonehill, the program that became Division I because there was no other option.
I don’t know the semantics or details, so take all of this with a grain of salt. Perceptively, Stonehill went Division I because it had to go Division I. The rest of the school was moving to the Northeast Conference, and the ability to play down to a Division III level was no longer an option for a program that’s been in existence. Rather than cut the team, it moved to a partial D-I schedule in 2022 before winding up in the unenviable position of playing what looked like an underfunded D-I schedule. Those players, for their part, gave the program their blood and tears, but playing in a municipal rink with a team lacking the overall resources – again, from a perception standpoint – as the other programs in the nation looked bad. I felt like that program was a lynchpin for eastern realignment if it could get its house pushed in the right direction because it looks a heckuva lot like the teams pushed into Division I back when the cost containment MAAC formed.
What he’s done is nothing short of remarkable. He kept players and developed them into a winning team that capitalized on Merrimack’s goalie situation. The 4-1 win over Lake Superior wasn’t an aberration, and the win over St. Lawrence was one game after a 2-1 loss to Minnesota Duluth. Those are legitimate programs and legitimate results.
Stonehill still doesn’t have the same profile as the other teams around the nation, but you and I both knew Berard was a great hire based on his reputation for helping build programs. We’d witnessed it at two different stops, essentially. From a coaching standpoint, what he’s accomplished in a short amount of time, I’d go so far as call him a candidate for the Spencer Penrose Award. He’s helped turn that program into a legitimate hockey team, and I’d hate hate hate hate hate HATE to play Stonehill with the mathematics towards the NCAA tournament hanging on the result.
