Finally, Big Ten steps into spotlight
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Considering the force of the impact it made on the sport, the Big Ten hockey conference certainly started with a soft launch.
Five years in, its presence finally has been felt. Three teams have reached the Frozen Four after four members landed in the top 12 seeds for the NCAA tournament.
“I think this is what everyone envisioned when the new leagues all started to form, that the Big Ten would be like this,” Michigan coach Mel Pearson said.
Minnesota Duluth, the outlier in the semifinals, plays Ohio State in the opener Thursday with Michigan-Notre Dame to follow.
“We were very fortunate to get the lead that we had in the regular season with that winning streak that we had, because we found out in the second half how challenging the conference is and how much better it got,” said Notre Dame coach Jeff Jackson, whose team won 16 consecutive games from Oct. 27 through Jan. 19.
UMD has a proud flag from the National Collegiate Hockey Conference to wave, too.
The Bulldogs have the most recent national championship of this football-defined quartet, in this building in fact. They beat Michigan and Notre Dame in 2011 to win the program’s first NCAA title. More relevant to the current roster is the trip to the national championship a year ago in Chicago, a 3-2 loss against Denver.
“Props to the Big Ten. Pretty awesome, having three teams in here. But at the same time, we know the NCHC is one of the top, if not the top conference in college hockey,” UMD captain Karson Kuhlman said Wednesday after practice.
UMD, with only nine players remaining from the national runner-up team last season, snagged the final at-large bid for the tournament after a wild weekend of conference tournament games that allowed the Bulldogs to nudge out Minnesota by a few percentage points. If just one of six of those contests would’ve gone the other way, the Gophers would’ve given the Big Ten a fifth entrant. Notre Dame’s win over Ohio State was one of the determinants.
“I owe Jeff Jackson a lot,” UMD coach Scott Sandelin said. “A couple beers in Florida will probably work. There’s about five other teams I could say the same thing for.”
Illinois is in the Big Ten queue for a potential expansion to eight teams, with fundraising in the works for a proposed new arena that would allow the university to establish an NCAA Division I program. That’s what Penn State did earlier this decade.
Minnesota reached the national title game in 2014, but the Gophers went one and done in the tournament the following year as the conference’s only entrant. Excluding Notre Dame’s appearances before joining the league, the Big Ten’s composite record in NCAA play was 5-7 before this season.
A year ago, the announced attendance total for all five games of the conference tournament in Detroit was a mere 11,785. In St. Paul in 2016, the combined crowds were just 15,886. The timing of the Big Ten’s infancy was coincidentally bad, too, with Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota and Wisconsin in down cycles.
Notre Dame’s arrival from Hockey East this season as an affiliate member was a big boost, though. Ohio State took a big step forward in coach Steve Rohlik’s fifth year. Penn State’s fledgling program made a second NCAA tournament appearance in a row.
The previous time a current member won the national title was Michigan State in 2007.