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.
PAULA: Ed, it’s so nice to be talking college hockey with you for another season and to hear your perspective on how things are going. We’re a month into it, and I confess that several things are surprising me already.
I’ll start with the current geographic shift at the top of the poll. It’s not unusual to see a state beginning with the letter “M” determining the focus of NCAA hockey discussions, but when that happens it usually means that teams in Massachusetts or Minnesota are dictating the conversation. With Michigan State, Michigan, and Western Michigan topping the poll for the second straight week, though, things look a little different in the early going.
The Spartans were at or near the top of the poll often last season and Michigan is a team that is always a threat, but the Wolverines have underperformed defensively in recent season and last year missed the NCAA tournament.
The Broncos have been impressive for the last four years running, culminating in the program’s first national championship at the end of last season. Western Michigan’s early-season performance is impressive.
The next three teams in the poll are those that rounded out the 2025 Frozen Four: No. 4 Penn State, No. 5. Boston University, No. 6 Denver. The Nittany Lions are 7-1-0 out of the gate and while the Terriers and Pioneers haven’t fared as well yet, it’s likely that the confidence that poll voters place in those teams won’t be misplaced.
How do you see things shaping up as we settle into the season? What’s catching your attention right now?
ED: Paula, I do agree that the state of Michigan is off to a nice start – at least for those three teams. (Michigan Tech also is off to a 4-2-0 start with a win over then-No. 8 Minnesota and is receiving votes in the poll.)
I think a few preseason poll voters may have overlooked the Wolverines based on recent results. They have everything going well for them, especially in net. Jack Ivankovic has played every minute (other than empty net) for Michigan, and the 1.38 goals against average and .937 save percentage for the freshman OHL product are a big part of that team’s early success. Michigan State and Western Michigan are no surprise, as you said.
Once we get past those three, what stands out to me is the number of upsets among ranked teams. As our colleague Jim Connelly pointed out on Monday’s Weekend Review podcast, in the first four weeks of the season, there have been 11 wins over the top-20 by non-ranked teams. Last season in the same stretch, there were just two.
Of those teams you mentioned, Penn State had a loss to Clarkson on home ice – Clarkson also upset North Dakota last Friday – and Denver dropped games at Lindenwood and Northeastern. The Pioneers also had a 1-1 tie at Air Force, scoring a controversial goal that Atlantic Hockey acknowledged should have been overturned on replay, at least according to at least three of my sources.
We’ve talked in this column about that dreaded and overused “p” word, parity. But it feels different this season. To me, it’s not about a team stealing a game so much as it is a more level playing field and more skill on every team. Do you agree?
PAULA: I have to laugh, Ed, because I think when you and I get together to have TMQ conversations, we bring up that dreaded “p” word more than appears in other TMQs – whether we’re in them or not.
I do sometimes wonder whether we’re reaching a point in men’s D-I hockey where we are achieving the parity we’ve bandied about for decades now, and whether that is the natural progression of things in a field with give or take 60 teams. Is this the natural evolution of a sport with so small a number of participants? What I mean by that is, without a significant expansion of the number of D-I teams, was some sort of parity an inevitability?
To some degree, I think that – yes – it was inevitable that we’d see that more level playing field that you mention, especially given the way teams can study opponents now in advance of play.
This year, though, feels unique to me – a much bigger leap forward in that evolution, if you will. This year, we have the addition of CHL players and the skill that many of them bring is hugely advantageous to many programs.
You mention Jack Ivankovic in Michigan’s net. Without him – or talent of his level between the pipes – the Wolverines are a different team. There are four freshmen goaltenders among the top 10 in the NCAA for goals-against average, and all four have Canadian major junior experience. All four play for teams that are either traditionally strong programs or play in strong conferences – Michigan, Penn State, Wisconsin and Denver – but the influx of CHL players makes for a bigger overall pool. Even if CHL players aren’t flocking to AHA teams, for example and at the moment, the expanded talent pool allows all teams access to high-end players with or without that major junior experience.
You mention Clarkson’s split with Penn State. In Clarkson’s 6-4 win, freshman Adrian Misaljevic, who came from Kitchner in the OHL, had two goals that were pivotal in that game. Early in the second period, Misaljevic scored to cut Penn State’s lead to one goal. His tally came 4:30, less than a minute after JJ Wiebusch put the Nittany Lions ahead 3-1 – and that was Weibusch’s second goal of the period. Misaljevic’s goal stopped some pretty significant Clarkson bleeding – even more impressive as Weibusch was in the middle of putting on a show, having already notched a hat trick and a few minutes prior to Weibusch’s fourth goal in the game.
At 10:10 in the third, Misaljevic had the fifth goal of the game for Clarkson, the third in the Golden Knights’ comeback effort, and that goal held up as the game winner.
Another freshman with OHL experience, Owen Van Steensel, had the second goal in Clarkson’s recovery from Wiebusch’s onslaught.
It isn’t just the influx of major junior talent, though. Additionally, many teams that are seeing success against ranked opponents use the portal to their advantage.
I guess the short answer to your question is yes, but things are far more interesting this season because of addition of CHL players – and that Clarkson win over Penn State is just one example.
ED: I think you’re right about this being the natural evolution with so few teams at the Division I level.
I was lying awake the other night and started doing some math in my head (sort of my own version of counting sheep I suppose). With 325-330 CHL players added to the mix this season, that works out to be about enough players to roster a dozen more programs if the displaced players were also included. With some rosters being cut to 26 players as schools adopt the House v. NCAA settlement, then I think there’s room to grow.
And actually, there already was. I think the sport could support 80 teams right now. (Someone is already formulating a comment that the sport is instead watered down and we need to go back to the days of 40 teams. They’re wrong.)
There are so many moving parts right now with CHL eligibility, the transfer portal, and NIL, that I don’t think anyone can make a prediction on where things are headed. However, there are some things we are likely to see.
First, I think we’ll see things happen on both ends of age eligibility. We’ll continue to see the 17- or 18-year-old NHL first-rounders go to the NCAA for development and NIL reasons. But we’ll also see 19- and 20-year-olds head to the NCAA when their time is up in Major Junior. Many of those will have made plans academically to be NCAA eligible, unlike this season where for some it has been a bit of a scramble.
Secondly, my hunch is that we’ll see more activity in the transfer portal and not less. A higher availability of players means that some others will find less playing time and seek greener pastures. We’re already in an era of players enrolling at four different schools for their four years, and that may continue. I suspect coaches will become less loyal themselves as the loyalty of players becomes even more of a thing of the past. At this point, college players have more mobility than pros. Every college player is essentially an unrestricted free agent.
I also think that college hockey will be a natural development step for more drafted players from the CHL and we’ll see the percentage of NHLers with NCAA experience work its way up to 50 percent in the next decade.
All of this makes me wonder if we need to allow bigger coaching staffs. The NCAA allows permits four paid coaches, and teams have added positions like director of hockey operations, general manager, and other “non-coaching” positions. I’ve been told by a few coaches that the whole recruiting process has become much more difficult with “free agency.” Are you hearing similar conversations?
PAULA: Before I answer your question, I want to comment on something you say in that segment, Ed, that has me thinking. You say that you suspect that coaches will become “less loyal” as college players become more like unrestricted free agents.
There are undoubtedly coaches in D-I who care only about wins and what it brings to them, their legacy, their bottom line, and as players shop around for greener pastures, some coaches will undoubtedly will find themselves becoming less invested in individual players or even their players as a whole.
There will always be coaches, though, who understand how retention works for marketing their product – even among those coaches who become less loyal. And while players may indeed become more like unrestricted free agents, D-I hockey coaches are employees of academic institutions. There are only a couple of NCAA sports in which coaches can afford to act in ways that may be perceived as less than invested in their students-athletes, and hockey isn’t one of them.
I’m not naïve enough to believe that for every coach we meet, developing the whole young person is the objective, but there are quite a few who take that task very seriously.
College hockey is such a fishbowl. I guess we’ll see what we see.
Now to your questions: yes, but not in so many words. Every Big Ten coach I spoke with or whose preseason presser I watched mentioned the expanded talent pool plus the portal in conjunction with how much more time-consuming recruiting has become. No one spoke with me on the record about expanding the number of paid coaches, but I imagine it’s a conversation that is happening a lot right now – and rightly so.
Pivoting a bit from this – and perhaps playing on it – who do you think has benefited from the most from CHL newbies and transfers, among the teams that you’ve been able to see this season? I mentioned the three Big Ten teams that are benefiting from goalies who are CHL alums, and I think that’s elevated an entire conferences in which goaltending hasn’t been the strongest in recent years, with some notable exceptions.
Who are you seeing so far with the best CHL and transfer acquisitions? And piggybacking on that if you’d like, whose overall recruiting class looks good to you this year?
ED: I suppose I could have used a better word than “loyal,” but what I was trying to get across was the idea that a coach might be more likely to cut a player if there’s going to be another one available.
I think back to the Sioux Falls regional in 2024 when a reporter asked former Rochester Institute of Technology coach Wayne Wilson about the commitment he had to players and the culture they had built at RIT, and how players responded to it by staying for four years. Within a couple of weeks, four of Wilson’s top players entered the portal.
That was the day that I started viewing college players differently. Perhaps I had an idealistic view of college hockey compared to basketball and football.
It was like Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up routine. “Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify, because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city,” Seinfeld said in a TV episode. “You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it.”
It’s like I mentioned a few weeks ago. There’s change and we can either grumble about it or adapt.
As far as who is benefiting most from CHL players and who has the best recruiting classes? I haven’t seen enough of a sample size yet to name specific teams. But my hunch so far is that while we have players like Gavin McKenna at Penn State or Michigan’s Ivankovic, or a few others making a splash as blue-chippers, we have many more teams with three, four, or five former CHL players bolstering the overall depth. Those are the ones who I think will make the most difference.