College Hockey Update:  Last weekend was another that provided five top-fifteen matchups, and two teams made the best of it as Boston College swept Vermont (BC held onto the #1 ranking, and Vermont was bumped out of the top fifteen to #16), and Minnesota swept Michigan, with Minnesota retaining the #2 ranking, and Michigan retaining the #10 spot.  Union prevailed over Cornell (Union held on to the #3 ranking after battling Colgate to a tie the next night, and Cornell dropped down to #13 as they also lost the next night to RPI), while Quinnipiac blanked Yale — Quinnipiac dropped a spot to #5 as they lost to Brown the next night, and Yale dropped a spot to #14 after beating Princeton the next night.  And the weekend could have gone better for Providence, as Notre Dame took a tie and a win over the weekend, which knocked Providence down a few pegs to #12, but propelled Notre Dame up five spots to enter the top fifteen at #15.

St. Cloud State took two games from Minnesota-Duluth, moving St. Cloud State up two spots to #4 in the poll, while Ferris State split the weekend with Bemidji State, and Ferris State dropped a couple of spots to #6 in the poll.  UMass-Lowell won its one game against UMass-Amherst, keeping Lowell at #7, while Wisconsin split with Ohio State, keeping the Badgers at #8.  Northeastern also won its one game against UMass-Amherst, lifting the Huskies three spots to the #9 ranking, and North Dakota swept Miami of Ohio, leap-frogging the no-name North Dakotans six pegs up to enter the top fifteen at #11.

This weekend provides a couple of top-fifteen matchups as #1 Boston College will host, and travel to, #7 UMass-Lowell (Boston College has already clinched the Hockey East regular season title), and #5 Union College will host #13 Cornell Friday night.

Oh, there is some additional interesting hockey going on right now.  In the Olympics, if you haven’t heard, Finland beat Russia, knocking them out of the semifinals, and therefore any shot at a medal.  Time to set alarm clocks, as tomorrow morning, Friday the 21st, the semifinals get started at 4:00am Pacific Time, with Finland playing Sweden, and then at 9:00am Pacific Time, the U.S. team will play Canada.  Some feel that the U.S. and Canada are the best two teams in the Olympics.  Then on Saturday, the 22nd, the losers of these two games will face off in the consolation game, with the bronze medal at stake, at 7:00am Pacific Time, and on Sunday, the winner of the semifinals will face off at 4:00am Pacific Time, to determine who gets the gold and silver medals.  With NBC covering this, who knows exactly where these games will appear.  Possibly live on NBC, or live on NBC Sports Network, CNBC, MSNBC, or USA Network.  Knowing NBC, and their overwhelming predisposition to cover their anointed heroes and to try to make every sports event in the world into a sappy, sobbing tear-fest, these games could be relegated to highlights shown in between some figure skating garbage during primetime.  Pray for a live broadcast somewhere.

So Notre Dame is back in the top fifteen.  Seems that most everyone knows something about Notre Dame, with NBC shoving them down everyone’s throats every weekend (can you say  Manti Teo and Lennay Kekua?), but let’s use some space here to take a little closer look.  Notre Dame was founded in 1842 as a primary and secondary school with two students in a log chapel, and was first chartered as a college in 1844.  It started its first library collection in 1873, and started a science program in 1880, building a science hall in 1883.  It sits on 1,250 acres in South Bend, Indiana, a town of 101,000, which is the center of a metro area of 317,000.  South Bend was founded in 1865, and it gets rather cold there, with an average low of eighteen degrees in January, and twenty-one degrees in February.  Notre Dame is the largest employer in South Bend, with 5,200 employees.  Notre Dame and has 12,000 students, 8,500 of whom are undergraduates.  It houses 80% of the undergraduate student body in one of twenty-nine dormitories — fifteen of which are all-male, and fourteen of which are all-female.  Famous Notre Dame alumni include Joe Montana, Mike Golic, Regis Philbin, and Phil Donahue.

In sports, their teams are known as the Fighting Irish, and they don’t seem to know if their colors are green and gold, or blue and gold.  Varsity hockey has gone on and off since 1912, with the current streak dating back to 1968 sort of, when they started play as an independent, and then joined the WCHA in 1971, and then moving to the CCHA in 1981.  After two years hockey was eliminated as a varsity sport, but a year later Notre Dame was back as an independent again, and then back into the CCHA in 1992.  Notre Dame made its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament in 2004.  In 2005, Notre Dame hired Jeff Jackson as the head coach, the first time Notre Dame had ever hired a coach who had previously coached a team to an NCAA championship, as he had coached Lake Superior State to the championship twice.  In 2007 Notre Dame was ranked for the first time ever as the #1 team in hockey, and in 2008, the team made it all the way to the NCAA Championship game, which it lost to Boston College.

Jackson had served as an assistant at Lake Superior State from 1986-90, and then as head coach there from 1990-96.  He was the head coach of the Guelph Storm from 2000-03, and was an assistant coach for the New York Islanders in 2003-04.  In Jackson’s first eight years, his record at Notre Dame was 160-97-30, and to date his lifetime record is 384-174-60.  He coached Notre Dame into an NCAA Tournament appearance as a #1 seed in 2007, to the championship game in 2008, and they were right back in 2009, (when they were smoked in the first round by 16th seed Bemidji State, 5-1), and they made it to the Frozen Four in 2011, and they were back in the NCAAs in 2013.  So let’s see — in eight years, Jackson coached Notre Dame to two CCHA regular season championships, three CCHA Tournament Championships, and five NCAA tournament appearances, including two trips to the Frozen Four, and one trip to the Championship Game.  Not bad, Jeff.

Notre Dame plays its games in the Compton Family Center, which opened in 2011, and which seats 5,000.  This season their roster is heavy in upper classmen experience, with eleven seniors, six juniors, five sophomores, and five freshmen.  Twenty-one members of the roster are from elite junior league teams, five are from high school — and all five are from the US under-18 development team, and one is a walk-on from a Notre Dame club hockey team.  Right now Notre Dame is 17-12-2, is ranked #15, and this weekend hosts a Boston University team that has not won a single game on the road all season, and has won only one game since November 30th, and that win was four weeks ago.  Look for Notre Dame to have nineteen wins very soon, and to climb up a peg or two in the poll.

This provides the top fifteen teams, rankings, records, and last weekend’s results:

[table id=83 /]

That’s all for now.  Stay tuned, and go Terriers!

— Tom