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: Another week in the books here in the college hockey world, and although the second semester is just getting started, it sure is starting to feel like the perfect continuation of the first semester.
Why, you might ask? Well, for starters, it’s probably because not much is changing atop our weekly poll. We had a couple of weeks to break up the difference in the holiday season, but the top three teams remain unchanged since their ascension to the top spots in mid-November.
That’s right. We haven’t had a different No.1, No. 2 or No. 3 team since we all went food shopping for Thanksgiving. For six straight polls, it’s been a stranglehold among Michigan, Michigan State and Wisconsin.
Michigan stays at the top of the USCHO rankings 〽️ pic.twitter.com/AfINUNXI6P
— Big Ten Hockey (@B1GHockey) January 12, 2026
Even dating back to Halloween, we’ve been largely untouched surrounding Michigan, but Michigan State’s split with Ohio State sent the Spartans tumbling to that dreaded spot known as “No. 4.”
Michigan State plays Wisconsin this week, and even though those three teams aren’t in top three spots of the NPI, I can’t imagine a world where this situation doesn’t quickly rectify itself.
To my colleague, Paula, are these three teams just operating on a different plane, and do you remember a time when three teams from one league were this highly regarded for this long of a stretch of the regular season?
PAULA: Dan, I thought that I’d remembered seasons past in which the NCHC dominated both the poll and the old PairWise Rankings, but after a trip through those archives, I didn’t find what I thought I would. There have been a number of leagues represented near the top of both metrics at least as far back as 2019.
While I think that the Big Ten is playing, collectively, the best hockey in its history, what surprises me the most about the conference’s dominance at the top of the poll is the perceptions of other poll voters.
From the three seasons previous to this one, the Big Ten had a non-conference win percentage in the .700s — unheard of before that in college hockey. This year, B1G’s nonleague play (.669) is eclipsed slightly by that of the NCHC (.677).
Something else that surprises me about the poll is that the top six teams are “western” teams and only two of the top 10 are from “eastern” conferences. (Please don’t come at me, people, about where Penn State is located. I understand geography.) That both of those top 10 teams representing eastern conferences are from the ECAC is another surprise.
We’ve talked a lot about how CHL players have changed the landscape of college hockey this season, and I think that has a lot to do with what we’re seeing, especially as it concerns the B1G and especially as it concerns goaltending. Three goalies from the CHL are among the top netminders in the country: Daniel Hauser (Wisconsin), Jack Ivankovic (Michigan) and Joshua Fleming (Penn State).
Beyond that, the Nittany Lions have an excellent goaltending tandem with Fleming and Kevin Reidler, a sophomore transfer from Omaha. And on top of all of that is Michigan State junior Trey Augustine, who has been one of the top netminders in the country for his entire career.
This embarrassment of goaltending riches is unusual for the B1G, and the teams I haven’t mentioned are by no means lacking in netminding talent. B1G Hockey feels like a conference where things are finally clicking into place.
So, of course, someone from Hockey East will win the national title, right?
DAN: I’ll be honest, I looked through the old Pairwise for that information too, which is why I asked. Sometimes I just doubt myself and I do this for a second set of eyeballs, so thank you for confirming what I found without telling me!
You know what’s funny is that Hockey East is on its way to becoming a one-bid or two-bid league at this rate. Ed pointed out last week that the “inside the bubble” conversation is pushing some leagues further outside of the bubble conversation, but I’m truly surprised that a league like Hockey East wasn’t able to nudge a second team into the debate. Northeastern’s regression was effectively replaced by Connecticut, but the top six teams are all western-based and the best eastern league is currently ECAC.
I remember a couple of years ago when I had to preview four ECAC teams in the tournament after Colgate won in Lake Placid. Three years later, things are a little different because it’s not just a case of Cornell sneaking into the tournament alongside the postseason champion. Even Princeton is up to No. 15 while Harvard and Union are No. 20 and No. 21. Right now, if the leagues held chalk, only one would send a champion to the tournament outside of the top 16 (shoutout to Atlantic Hockey America).
Welcome to the dichotomy of college hockey, where we have both parity and dominance, I guess.
That said, there are still some pleasant surprises. Aside from Dartmouth, I love that Princeton is inside the field, but are there bubble teams that you’re surprised are in the conversation while more traditional teams are sitting outside?
PAULA: I was only half-joking when I said that a Hockey East team would win the national championship following a season in which other conferences seem more dominant.
Among the outliers that surprise me now are Boston University — picked in preseason to top Hockey East and only five points out of first in that tight conference — and Maine.
It’s good to see the CCHA so well represented in the NPI conversation, with Augustana currently at No. 12, St. Thomas at No. 14 and Minnesota State at No. 16. Of course, one of the more interesting things about that is that both the Vikings and the Tommies — the CCHA’s two newest members — lead CCHA teams in the NPI and are tied at the top of that conference with 30 points each.
Given how the NPI works, it will be difficult for any of those CCHA teams to improve their NCAA lot significantly. No matter their success, they’ll circle around that bubble for the remainder of the season.
It’s one of the reasons why early and midseason nonconference play is so important now and one of the reasons why the B1G and the NCHC look so strong and the ECAC appears emergent. I hate to go all Calvinistic in my second-half outlook, but there does seem to be a good deal of predestiny happening, if the “pre” part of that predestiny pertains to early season play.
It’s also why the Michigan State-Wisconsin series feels so important this weekend for more than just B1G standings — but that’s not the only series that is looming large. Princeton-Cornell and Denver-North Dakota could nudge a few things, depending on outcome.
You know me, though, Dan. As much as I like talking about the national picture, I love the individual conference races. Nothing is more exciting to me than that.
In five conferences, nothing comes close to being decided at the top. In the CCHA, St. Thomas and Augustana are tied at the top with 30 points each followed by Minnesota State and Michigan Tech with 28 points apiece, and sixth-place Bemidji State is only five points out of first place.
There’s a bigger spread in the NCHC, where first-place North Dakota has 29 points and fourth-place Minnesota Duluth has 21. Only North Dakota and Denver control their own destiny in terms of finishing first in the conference.
There’s a bit more of a top tier in the B1G, the ECAC and Hockey East with teams bunched at the tops of those standings. Any of the top four teams from both the Big Ten and ECAC can win the regular-season title by winning out or close to it. Hockey East is so convoluted, though, that Providence and Boston College are the only top-tier teams that control their own fate — and, weirdly, so does New Hampshire, although it’s unlikely that the Wildcats would win 15 games and capture the conference.
Then there’s Atlantic Hockey, where first-place Bentley is nine points ahead of RIT and Holy Cross, who are each tied for second place with 27 points. Of those two teams, only Holy Cross has the ability to overtake Bentley without significant help from other teams, because the Crusaders have two games in hand on both Bently and RIT.
It strikes me as unfair, Dan, that the conference most likely to have a team run away with its regular-season title will see only one team play its way into the NCAA tournament by means of the playoff championship autobid, and that team may not be the one that dominated conference play. You mention that dichotomy of both parity and dominance. Is there any way to address that? Especially when one or two leagues seem to be the odd duck out nearly perennially?
DAN: I mean, as long as it’s Bentley in Atlantic Hockey, I’d be OK with it, right? I’ll just embrace that role now before I go into full homer mode later in the season.
I think the NPI is the great equalizer in that respect, and I suppose I’m coming around to it more and more because it removes the doubt associated with the politicking of the so-called smoke-filled rooms. I remember how I wanted Army in the tournament during COVID because that was the perfect opportunity for Atlantic Hockey to gain a second team. That was also before the postseason tournament ended in shambles because of the pandemic. A long time ago that’s not too far, and my goodness, can we never do that again?
But back to the question. I’m a dreamer here, and I’m always in favor of a radical change. I’d personally like to see a scheduling structure that forces teams to play one another at various intervals. Drawing from the NFL, the schedule is set by the end of a season by forcing cross-divisional matchups with whichever team finished in the same spot. That means that a first place team is hypothetically forced to play the hardest possible schedule while the last place team plays the easiest possible schedule.
That’s nearly impossible with uneven conferences, but I’d love to see more scheduling arrangements foundationalize cross-conference matchups. I don’t mean it in a sense of a predetermined ACC-SEC Challenge in basketball, but maybe there’s a certain amount of games that are forced against teams that finish within a range of finishing spots. Maybe we can push Michigan to play a team that finished among the top percentage of each league, which would then necessitate a non-conference schedule that could include Holy Cross, Union, Minnesota State, Augustana, Arizona State, and whichever team finished in the top four of Hockey East (I have no issues with its series against Providence).
Anyway, it’s my annual spitballed idea that would open the challenge and possibly force points for each team and league. The NPI isn’t broken in that respect, but let’s get weird!
PAULA: You talk about pushing Michigan, for example, to play top teams from other conferences when here I sit equidistant from Ann Arbor and East Lansing and I’d like to push the teams in those little cities to add women’s hockey. But I digress.
I don’t see the NPI removing “the doubt associated with the politicking of the so-called smoke-filled rooms” because I see the PairWise having done that. It’s taken me half a season to understand the NPI better because I am sometimes a slow learner who needs to see examples to grasp abstractions, and the examples that the NPI is providing are instructive. The PWR was math. The NPI is math. The math in each is contextualized differently — but it’s math and not opinion.
I do think, too, that the haves of the college hockey world have put more effort into allowing for interconference play with the have-nots — and let’s not pretend that there aren’t haves and have nots — but I can see a ton of pushback from individual conferences if they’re forced to schedule in the ways similar to the NFL example you mention. That’s where the real backroom discussions will come into play, and as egalitarian as everyone tries to appear to be when front-facing, many established programs with longer histories of success will simply balk. Some will couch that in conference scheduling language, and you won’t even see the evidence of that low-key revolt surface among some other leagues, but it will exist all the same.
There is such good hockey being played all across the conferences right now. I’m glad to see the CCHA and ECAC rewarded for it but keep wondering what it will take for Atlantic Hockey to experience a similar breakthrough. I don’t have answers. I do have a lot of questions.