TMQ: Getting primed for this weekend’s Boston University-Boston College series, discussing future NCAA regional locations

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, I think you’ll agree that while college hockey itself is great – and perhaps in a golden age – what makes it even better is when longtime rivals meet. We had a wild series last weekend between Michigan and Michigan State and the first-ever No. 1 vs. No. 2 set up between Boston University and Boston College next weekend.

Let’s start with Michigan at Michigan State on Friday. The visiting Wolverines got out to a 6-0 lead before Nicolas Muller broke the shutout at 12:40 of the third period. Tempers boiled over and opponents paired up in a scuffle that resulted in eight roughing minors and six misconducts in a game with a combined 37 penalties and 168 penalty minutes. I mean, I’m not really a hockey fight fan, but I love a heated rivalry. And especially one that’s seemed a bit one-sided in recent seasons.

The second half of the series was Saturday at Yost, and saw Michigan take a 4-1 lead at the midway point before six straight tallies by the Spartans – in a game with only 10 combined penalty minutes.

That turnaround by Michigan State may have defined much of the rest of this season. A weekend sweep at the hands of their bitterest rival – especially after Friday’s thumping – may have altered the path of the rest of the campaign.

With that in the rear-view mirror, we look ahead to an historic home-and-home renewal of the Battle of Commonwealth Avenue. This must be the talk of college hockey fans back east in Beantown where you call home.

Dan: Ed, you’re about to ask a Boston guy about a Boston rivalry that’s atop the college hockey universe. Can we just state for the record that I don’t have enough words for this?

Let’s just start with the fact that BC and BU have never been No. 1 and No. 2 when they’ve played each other. The closest thing that exists is 1978’s NCAA tournament championship game when Jack Parker won his first title by beating BC 5-3 and while this game is in the regular season, we’re kicking off a two-week span where the two sides of the Green Line’s B Branch collide for three different games. Both of these teams are playing top-level hockey, and the staggering number of pro-level talent only adds to the fact that they’re on another planet compared to the rest of college hockey right now.

The subplots to this game are incredible. They’re the top two teams in Hockey East but the six-point difference between them feels negligible compared to their identical overall records and nearly-identical offensive and defensive numbers. Hobey Baker candidates exist on both rosters, as do future NHL’ers. Cutter Gauthier is one of the nation’s best scorers, but Macklin Celebrini (and his top-rated NHL Draft prospects) are every bit as good as the drama surrounding the Philadelphia Flyers, Anaheim Ducks, and whatever the heck happened with Gauthier. Gabe Perreault, Will Smith, Lane Hutson, Jeremy Wilmer, Ryan Greene – there are good-to-great-to-elite college hockey players all over each team’s stat sheet.

But the biggest element to this game is naturally the national standing. I don’t want to spend too much time hammering the Pairwise Rankings this week, buuuuuuut BU and BC are equally the top two teams in the statistical rankings. The winner of this series – along with the fact that they meet again in a little over a week when the Beanpot heads to TD Garden – is the start of a run that’ll determine who can claim the top spot in the NCAA tournament.

For people who aren’t aware, that’s a bigger story than anyone wants to think about because UMass is tied with Providence and St. Cloud for 11th in the current Pairwise. I’m not a mathematician here to break down how every little win or loss impacts things, but it doesn’t take NASA-level scientists to know that the Minutemen are site hosts for one of the regional sites. I know it’s been mentioned several times over, but locking them into a local regional when a Hockey East team might not be able to play them in the first round – not without a weird or crazy breakdown of the selection criteria, at least – means this game might determine who stays home and who gets sent to Missouri. I can’t see a situation where the No. 1 seed plays anywhere outside of the Northeast if it’s BC or BU, and while there are a number of impactful conversations to have, the simplest – the absolute, most-simple, unabridged conversation – says the No. 1 seed would stay in Providence while the No. 2 seed gets sent west.

We still have a conference tournament season, and we still have a number of games that could cost everyone along the way, but that’s sure going to make the hype machine go crazy for this week’s game.

Needless to say, I think the Corrib Pub and T’s are both going to be ROCKING this week.

I’m trying to remember a time when so much felt like it was riding on regular season games. Nothing rang an immediate bell, but I readily admit that life ends at the 495 exit on the Mass Pike. Worcester is Western Mass to me (and everyone else who grew up inside 128…all you good Minnesota folks have no idea what I just said, but I love you all the same). This is awesome for Boston, and it gets me closer to my “Boston teams take over the Frozen Four in Minnesota” storyline that I drummed up at the beginning of the year.

You know we eventually need to double back to games that cost teams (sorry, Quinnipiac), but do you remember when there was a regular-season game that might’ve felt this big?

Ed: Off the top of my head, I didn’t remember any games with teams that were No. 1 and No. 2 in the USCHO poll and staunch rivals and with NCAA tournament seeding all on the line. Even to non-Hockey East people like me and those who don’t know what or where the Green Line is, it’s clear that this is a big deal.

Looking back through our records, I guess for a rivalry you might point to No. 2 Denver beating No. 1 Colorado College, 1-0, in the WCHA Final Five on March 19, 2005. But the biggest overall game would have to be No. 1 Union beating No. 2 Minnesota, 7-4, in the 2014 NCAA D-I men’s ice hockey national championship game. That shows you how rare these 1-2 battles are, even in the tournament.

But you’re right about the implications. They’re huge. Every game matters, whether it’s in October or March, but we notice them a lot more at this time of year.

While we’re on the topic of the NCAA tournament, I was hoping we could weigh in on the ongoing discussion of the NCAA regionals. Our colleague Brad Schlossman of the Grand Forks Herald – named Monday as the 2023 North Dakota sportswriter of the year – wrote a detailed opinion piece last week advocating for having separate rounds of 16 and 8 on campus one week apart at the higher seeds. He started the piece by noting that Minnesota played before the smallest crowd of its season against Harvard in the 2022 Albany regional, and included a photo he took from the press section. I also covered that regional for USCHO.com and witnessed the emptiness of that arena, which only had seats available in the lower bowl. Brad’s piece has me about 95% convinced.

The first item on my list of reasons why I agree has to do with the venues. Half empty (at best) aging AHL arenas with no atmosphere are not a great advertisement for the sport. They look dismal on television, and there’s little energy in the building. Even great fan bases like North Dakota’s, who travel better than almost anyone, are likely to fill a regional in Fargo, but to ask them to travel on short notice to the east coast when many stalwarts already have Frozen Four tickets and travel plans is a big ask.

Secondly, the system of allowing regional host institutions to play at their host venue means that a four seed might host near home, while a No. 1 seed ends up losing the perks that should come with that great season. While Brown and not Providence was the host of the 2019 Providence regional, it still was like a home game for the Friars, who staged a huge comeback to down No. 3 overall Minnesota State, who under an on-campus site system would have hosted the first round and the second, had they advanced.

Certainly there are some logistical issues for television. ESPN would have to have two weekends of crews with eight sets of broadcasters the first week, although in response to Schlossman’s article, John Buccigross said on X that his network would be able to handle it.

I’ve got a lot more I could opine with on this, but I want to make sure you get a word in edgewise, Dan.

Dan: I’m actually going to head off the beaten path in the debate for a little bit because I honestly don’t know where the right decision points.

There are certainly positives and negatives to moving on campus, but I’m going to just ask a few key questions about factors that we’d have to take under consideration. What I will offer is that Brad gave us the first real concrete suggestion of how it could work rather than just screaming about one way or the other. For that, I fall back on something my dad always told me: “Don’t say no unless you have an alternative.”

For what it’s worth, he also told me never to date a coworker, but dating her prompted me to switch jobs to somewhere where I became significantly happier. We’ve also been married for eight-plus years and have two kids, so maybe he got that one wrong. Anyways…

My first point is a little bit of pointed criticism for everyone blindly advocating a move back to campus sites. It’s easy to forget that not everyone in college hockey has the robust or vast facilities available to places like Boston University, Minnesota, Penn State, Michigan or North Dakota. Those places can host thousands of people and pile teams into their barns, as far as I know. On the off-hand chance that a facility is smaller, a place like Lawson Arena at Western Michigan seats less than 4,000 people. In fact, the majority of arenas that come to mind in the ECAC are less than 4,000 seats, including Quinnipiac. Providence’s two college teams are just over 3,000, and Harvard is even lower than that.

From my perspective, the switch to campus sites therefore comes with significant risk about whether those facilities can handle the capacity of hosting a national tournament game. It’s easy to look at the argument from the larger schools’ perspective, but think about the 2015 NCAA tournament when Miami went to the East Regional in Providence. If Miami is hosting at the Goggin Center, that’s about 3,500 who can go to a game.

For comparison’s sake, Bridgeport had an announced attendance of more than 4,500 people in last year’s tournament, while the East Regional final between Boston University and Cornell drew 7,100 people. Yes, the Bridgeport regional was about half-full, but the numbers were still bigger. None of this – I want to reiterate that NONE OF THIS – is a knock against the schools, but it’s something to take into consideration.

The other consideration is, in my mind, how the bids are then figured out past the first round. I think about baseball and how the NCAA bids out the Super Regionals – the top eight national seeds are guaranteed to host the Super Regional round if they advance, and the teams seeded No. 1 in those other brackets default to hosting capabilities if the national seed doesn’t advance. If neither team advances, the two teams that do advance receive an opportunity to bid, at which point preference is given to the better seed.

Not every facility is designed to host one of those large-scale events beyond even the capacity, and I can think of a half-dozen scenarios where a team in the bracket wouldn’t have been able to host if they’d advanced. Beyond that, scheduling can cause an issue where facilities are in use after the season ends. I think specifically of the time in the Atlantic Hockey postseason when AIC had to move its playoff series to the Olympia Ice Center because the MassMutual Center was being used for Disney on Ice.

These are all things that the committee would need to account for, and none of this, I want to repeat for the umpteenth time, illustrates my stance on this being a positive or a negative. It’s simply a matter of asking pointed questions about how to advance forward, and I’ll readily admit that I don’t know what the right answer is. I don’t envy anyone on the committee.

Ed: You bring up good points. And that’s why a decision like this wouldn’t be a slam dunk … er, uh, empty-net goal.

I also get your point about attendance in smaller arenas. So I decided to take a look at what the capacity would have been for the field of 16 last season, and the ensuing field of eight. The attendance figures for the regional semifinals are for single tickets for both games so the attendance for any single game will be less than shown. We only have the official box score numbers and not the turnstile count for each.

So there are some games which would have had a smaller paid attendance: Harvard, Quinnipiac, and Penn State. Meanwhile, Minnesota and Denver could have had double the attendance with home games.

Looking at the field of eight/regional finals round, which assumes the same winning teams:

The total capacity of the round of 16 was 48,482 vs. announced attendance of 40,442. It was closer for the round of eight, only 763 more, but again those are paid numbers and not butts in the seats.

Travel could be less expensive. Instead of having to provide travel for 16 teams, eight teams would travel in the first round and four in the second.

In addition, the home ice advantage may not be as profound as it would seem. It’s there, of course, but over the 2022-23 season, non-neutral site home teams were 581-420-79 for a winning percentage of .575. Significant, yes. But not insurmountable.

If this were a simple, black-and-white case, there wouldn’t be salient points on each side.

Given that, would you at least consider giving it a go for a couple of seasons if you were the czar of D-I men’s college hockey? I think it’s worth a try. We might like it, or find that the current way is better.

Dan: So here’s my final answer to all of this.

An executive with a professional sports franchise once told me that no organization can ever be satisfied with the status quo. Even if no moves are made, the job of any good executive is to continue searching for ways to improve. With respect to being the resident speaker of the house of hockey commons, I’ll be open to any change that’s researched, thought-out and immediately dissected internally as a step forward. Experimenting with anything can’t be wrong. If it doesn’t work out, then we just go back to the way things were. What was the thing with Thomas Edison – I didn’t fail, it was just a 2,000-step process?

My last word on it is just to make sure that we’ve dotted all i’s and crossed all t’s, and I believe the hockey committee folks are doing that. I trust them to do the right thing, and I’m supportive of the decisions that are made or will be made. I’m sure that everything is being taken into consideration one way or the other – even down to things like number of luxury boxes and hotel availability on long and short notice. The bids are comprehensive. It’s a fascinating debate, and I love, if nothing else, embracing the debate.

That said, I’d love to end this with a lighter note. Because we’re both Atlantic Hockey guys, how badly would you have wanted an NCAA regional somehow hosted at the old John A. Ryan Arena?

Ed: So, Dan, as we were wrapping this up, it came to my attention via some social media posts that I needed to check on the seating capacity for the Centene Community Ice Center, the arena for the Maryland Heights Regional outside of St. Louis. It’s the home ice for the Lindenwood Lions and a practice facility for the St. Louis Blues. According to the facility’s website and Lindenwood athletics, it has a seating capacity of 2,500. That’s not a typo. Two thousand five hundred seats.

Why are we worried about small ECAC facilities when an arena that small was awarded a bid? Imagine if Minnesota or Denver are placed there! I rest my case.

And to answer your question about the JAR hosting a regional? That’s the stuff nightmares are made of.