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: Well, Dan, there’s a new No. 1 this week and understandably so. After holding the top spot since Dec. 16, Michigan State drops to No. 2 and Boston College ascends to No. 1 for the first time this season.
The Eagles held the top poll spot from Jan. 29, 2024 to Mar. 25, 2024, a run of nine weeks at No. 1. In their last six weeks in that spot, the Eagles were a unanimous No. 1 pick.
Last weekend, Boston College asserted its dominance with a home-and-home sweep against No. 7 Providence while Michigan State split a home-and-home series with No. 10 Michigan.
There’s so little movement in the top 10 that it looks to me as though voters are unified in the opinion that Hockey East, the Big Ten and the NCHC are solid from top to bottom.
That also explains to me why No. 16 North Dakota and No. 19 Colorado College are still polling. There’s a better argument for voting for the Fighting Hawks than the Tigers – and no offense intended to either program. North Dakota, swept at home by No. 3 Western Michigan, is above .500 in conference play. Colorado College split with Minnesota Duluth, is 1-5-0 since the start of 2025, is below .500 in NCHC games and is 33rd in the PairWise Rankings.
I look at Sacred Heart – 30th in the PWR and playing in a league where it’s nearly impossible to improve that position – leading the Atlantic Hockey standings by seven points and 4-1-1 in their last six games, including a win and tie against Cornell two weeks ago.
Then I look at Arizona State moving from No. 13 to No. 11 after sweeping at St. Cloud and I’m wondering what the Sun Devils have to do to be trusted. They’re 10-2-0 since mid-November with eight of those wins coming in conference play and a sweep of Denver to their credit. They’ve moved into the 12th spot in the PWR and are a point ahead of Western at the top of the NCHC standings.
What stories do this poll and this last weekend of hockey tell you, Dan?
Dan: Normally, I’d take this opportunity to rail against the college hockey elitism surrounding Hockey East and the traditional powers, but the truth is that those teams are simply playing better hockey. Even for a long-term contrarian like me, it’s impossible to ignore the strength of those teams and what they’ve accomplished.
The last week proved as much, at least. I started the week by giving Providence its No. 1 vote in the national poll. I mentioned this several times, but my theory behind my vote was similar to when I voted Connecticut into the top spot a few years ago. I didn’t necessarily think PC was the best team in the country or the best team for the long haul, but the losses surrounding my poll and where I initially held the Friars forced me to move them one spot over each team until I was simply left with them in the No. 1 spot. Michigan State’s tie against Penn State aside, I didn’t have a second team to push PC down a spot.
This week, BC did everything except take that team’s lunch money. I don’t think PC played badly per se, but the results favored the Eagles so heavily that it’s impossible to ignore how they’d be anything other than No. 1. Considering the rest of Hockey East’s placement in the Pairwise, it all lined out in kind.
The one story that I really noticed, though, was the willingness to drop UMass Lowell from No. 9 to No. 12 after the River Hawks lost to Stonehill. It’s obvious that enough people noticed the loss on more than just paperwork, and it’s all the credit in the world to how the Skyhawks scored late in the third and won in overtime. The loss was shocking enough that Lowell dropped in the poll alongside the Pairwise.
I called Stonehill a lynchpin for realignment a number of years ago because I saw a path forward for the team to invest in college hockey. Getting the right coach in David Berard moved the Skyhawks to 8-19 this year, which is more than a modest improvement over last year’s record. For what you might’ve seen from other erstwhile independents, I love that college hockey is still a home for results like that to happen.
Paula: Yes. I also love that college hockey still has room for “little” programs – newcomers and/or schools not widely known in DI sports – to make some occasional or even significant noise.
You bring up Stonehill and I concur with everything you say about the Skyhawks while reserving the right to lament the fate of independent teams. As a member of the Big 12 and an R1 school – R1 being academic talk for institutions that engage in a lot of research – Arizona State had an advantage over other independents from the start, and the program there did everything right to catch the attention of a conference. Frankly, the NCHC is richer in many ways for taking in the Sun Devils.
Back to Stonehill. I don’t think that Lowell’s loss to Stonehill was shocking. A loss like that, though, does give voters a way to differentiate between teams they perceive to be close in parity – just like it did at the top of the standings when BC took care of business this week and Michigan State did not.
I think, too, that at this point in the season, many poll voters look at the PWR as a guide – and perhaps too much. I see the poll as a snapshot of current hockey and the PairWise as a sort of long-term indicator.
It is interesting to see the current breakdown of teams by league in the top 16 in the PWR right now. Hockey East is dominant with seven followed by the Big Ten’s four, NCHC’s three and one each for the CCHA and ECAC. And while the talent I see displayed in HEA games from top to bottom is impressive, a look at numbers throughout DI shows talent to be distributed across conferences. There are so many collegiate players that should be household names, guys from unlikely places that I can see transitioning into high-level professional hockey.
Do people outside of the Big Ten and NCHC know Ryan Kirwan, a transfer from Penn State to Arizona State, and his 14 goals this season including the three he scored against St. Cloud this past weekend? How about Bowling Green sophomore Brody Waters and his 14 goals, three from last weekend against Ferris State? I look at Augustana’s Joshua Kotai and his nation-leading .945 save percentage and his third-best 1.68 GAA and I guarantee that no one wants to face the Vikings should they get into the tourney by way of a playoff conference championship, which is a possibility.
Hockey East, the Big Ten and the NCHC are tough from top to bottom, but there is talent everywhere. Who are your unsung heroes or under-the-radar players so far this season, Dan?
Dan: I’m actually going to take it off the board and say that the most underappreciated folks in college hockey are actually the assistant coaches.
Head coaches love them, and every head coach in every interview from my ECAC coverage pointedly discusses their power play or penalty kill specialist whenever they talk about utilizing their depth charts. Some of those assistants are now head coaches – Ben Syer went from Cornell to Princeton this year and Bill Riga is in his fourth year at Holy Cross after spending a dozen years with Quinnipiac, for example – but I think the best teams in college hockey all have very good assistants who take their team to another level. Speaking strictly for the east, Greg Brown’s Boston College team has a truly great assistant coach in Mike Ayers, and he’s been with the program since its days under Jerry York. Mike Cavanaugh is another name that comes to mind, and he’s the architect of Connecticut’s ability to build a powerhouse in Hockey East, as well.
Every single one of those teams understands how to utilize players who aren’t top scorers. They’re the second and third pairing defensemen who kill the right shift and soften the right matchup, and I’m sure Michigan and Minnesota and Michigan State all have those players on their team. I don’t want to keep coming back to BC, but I admittedly see more of the Eagles as someone who works with the team and watches Massachusetts hockey. So players like Brady Berard and Oskar Jellvik and Aidan Hreschuk are more readily available at the front of my brain.
They won’t gain Hobey Baker consideration, at least, but I’d love to find an award that’s some type of “puttin’ on the foil” honors for the college game.
I know that’s super succinct, but I’m curious what names come to mind for you as someone. Who were some of the truly great assistant coaches or underrated players that we’ve long forgotten or not given the right attention over the years?
Paula: Trips down memory lane like this usually detour into places that aren’t quite so attaboy – anecdotes about coaches who really stood out for all the wrong reasons.
In nearly three decades of covering men’s D-I hockey, I’ve encountered a lot of guys who have gone on to do some pretty amazing things. Having Adam Nightingale return to Michigan State as a head coach the year that Brandon Naurato was named head coach at Michigan was a surreal – and kind of lovely – moment. Living in southeast Michigan, I’d heard every good thing about each of those gents before they came back to their alma maters. Each is widely respected for work in player development as well as coaching, and it’s no surprise to anyone around these parts that Nightingale is rebuilding a strong program in East Lansing and that Naurato did some heavy lifting in Michigan.
With the addition of Will Horcoff to Michigan’s roster at midseason, it’s impossible not to think of his dad, Shawn, who played at Michigan State (1996-2000). After playing in the NHL for 15 seasons, Shawn Horcoff was named the director of player development for the Detroit Red Wings and is now the assistant general manager for the Wings and the GM for the AHL’s Grand Rapids Griffins. Not bad for a kid from a small town in British Columbia.
When I think assistant coaches, I think of someone like Minnesota head coach Bob Motzko, who is exactly the same great guy he was when he was an assistant at Miami back in the 1990s, or Denver assistant Tavis MacMillan, who played for years for Alaska, coached there for 10, and is now a part of the coaching staff for the machine that is Denver hockey.
Motzko certainly gets recognition. I don’t think people outside of college hockey circles know MacMillan and I think that Shawn Horcoff’s profile will be a little more sparkly because his son is going to be fantastic – and I think the elder Horcoff is okay with that.
A lot of the assistants and players I remember for being unsung at their time eventually got the recognition they deserved, and most of them are from the days of the old CCHA. I still see current Ohio State assistant coach J.B. Bittner sliding across the ice after scoring the overtime game winner against Miami in the semifinal game of the 2004 CCHA championship tourney.
In the current CCHA, though, it’s impossible not to recognize what former St. Cloud and Minnesota assistant Garrett Raboin has been building at Augustana since 2022. After going 12-18-4 last year, the Vikings are 13-7-2 this season, and Raboin just helped Team USA win a gold medal in the 2025 IIHF World Juniors.
I know I may not have gone where you asked, Dan, but at least I managed to avoid telling a Frank Anzalone story or veer into talking about some of the gooniest guys I’ve covered.
Dan: I was on the verge of including a Joe Marsh story and veering over to those St. Lawrence teams of yore, so I’ll take it. One of the only people who spanned my brother Michael’s undergrad days at Brown and the start of my own broadcasting and media journey.
As the saying goes, nobody was in college hockey until they got a Joe Marsh story.
Maybe another time.
