Your Team’s Next NCAA Game May Be a Month Away
by Adam Wodon/Managing Editor (@chn-adam-wodon)
The down side of blue-chip Major Junior players joining college hockey teams, is that a number of them will leave for the World Junior tournament.
This is not a new phenomenon in college hockey. American players have been going to the World Juniors for a long time.
But what’s new is that Team Canada brings its players into camp one week earlier than Team USA.
Now, this season, this affects just four teams — Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State and North Dakota. And my guess is, college hockey fans around the country that aren’t fans of those teams, are not exactly spilling tears for any of them.
However, this will have an impact on college hockey as a whole going forward, just as American players leaving has.
Beginning in the early 2000s or so, a number of the big-time programs stopped scheduling games during the two-week period around the World Junior tournament. The number of teams doing this, and the period of time it encompasses, has gotten bigger and bigger over the years, to the point where now, there are very few games played nationwide between today and the second week of January.
While only a handful of blueblood college hockey programs regularly sends a bunch of players to the World Juniors, the rest of college hockey needs someone to play. And it’s gotten to the point where more teams are sending players, so more teams are taking long breaks.
There used to be a robust in-season slate of tournaments. As recently as the 1990s, basically every team in college hockey participated in some sort of four-team holiday-time tournament. Most of them participated in one around Thanksgiving too. This was a tradition that dated back decades.
Now, just about every one of those tournaments is gone. Even Dartmouth’s stalwart holiday tournament bit the dust this year. Michigan stopped playing in the Great Lakes Invitational years ago now. That’s a shame.
Coaches love to talk about “growing the game,” but what are we doing here? I guess it depends upon your definition.
Now with yet another week affected — Team Canada’s camp starts this weekend — will some coaches be apt to halt their schedules even earlier?
In the past, you’d see maybe one or two college hockey players a year at Team Canada’s camp. This year there are seven.
How much longer of a break can we take?
Part of the blame goes to the Pairwise — the system (replaced this year, but the concept is the same) that has been selecting and seeding the NCAA Tournament since the early 1990s. For many years, the workings of the Pairwise remained a black box mystery even to coaches. As they began getting wise to it, they realized they could ill afford to put themselves at a disadvantage for any particular game. Every game had too much importance.
Remember, up until 1980, the NCAA Tournament consisted of four teams, and the only thing that mattered was getting to your conference’s postseason tournament championship game. With the Pairwise, and 12- and 16-team fields, it’s a whole other ballgame.
So I get the issue, and the dilemma, but something has been lost along the way. It’s bad enough that so much of what made college sports great seems to have eroded lately, but this one doesn’t feel like a heavy lift. There’s got to be some way to have those tournaments again, and keep everyone happy.
A tweak to the formula maybe?
I don’t know. You tell me.
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