College Hockey Update:  Last weekend gave us seven of the top twenty teams playing in six top-twenty matchup games, and the big, big news here would have to be that Boston College suffered a tie — they didn’t win both games over the weekend, can you believe it?  Let’s put this in perspective — you remember Thanksgiving, right?  The turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and so on, right?  You know, that big holiday on a Thursday, that was three months ago?  Well, the day after that, Friday, November 29th, was the last time these guys lost a game.  That is nineteen games without a loss; seventeen of the last nineteen games have been wins, with a couple of ties thrown in there — BC had won eleven straight games until their tie on Saturday night.  The question seriously has to be, do you think anything, or anyone, is going to stop these guys from winning it all?

So on with the top twenty matchups — BC beat and tied UMass-Lowell, with BC retaining the #1 ranking, and Mass-Lowell retaining the #7 spot.  And there’s more big news, as Quinnipiac lost two important games to Cornell and Colgate; Quinnipiac dropped a few notches to #8, while Cornell moved up a couple to #11 (they also beat Princeton the next night), and Colgate moved up a few spots to #16 (they had beaten Princeton the night before).  Colgate is now in the range of making the NCAA tournament, depending on how the rest of the season goes, as they are on the edge (this, of course, could be said about a number of teams).  Northeastern tied and beat Maine, with Northeastern retaining the #9 ranking, and Maine dropping a notch to #18.

Elsewhere, Union College retained the #3 ranking after beating Clarkson and St. Lawrence; Ferris State moved up a couple of spots to #4 on their sweep of Alaska-Anchorage; St. Cloud State edged down to #5 after they split with Miami of Ohio, and Wisconsin continued its ascent, this week up a couple to #6, after sweeping Michigan State.  North Dakota edged up to #10 after sweeping Minnesota-Duluth, Providence held at #12 after sweeping UMass-Amherst, Michigan dropped a few pegs to #13 after splitting with Penn State, and Notre Dame edged up to #14 after sweeping Boston University (BU is the near exact opposite case of BC, as BU has gone eighteen games with only one win and three ties, and fifteen losses — they have a nine game non-winning streak, and they have lost seven of those nine with two ties; the next recipient of BU’s charity will be Northeastern.  Barring some type of Hockey East playoff miracle, BU is now assured of having the worst season since the 1963 season, fifty-one years ago; last weekend’s two shutout loss to Notre Dame is the first time BU has lost two consecutive shutouts since the 1942 season, seventy-two years ago.).  Yale dropped a notch to #15 after beating Harvard and losing to Dartmouth, Vermont dropped a peg to #17 after sweeping Merrimack, and Denver dropped a couple to #20 after they were swept by Colorado College.

Here we are at the end of the season.  This will be the last weekend of regular season games for Hockey East, the ECAC, and Atlantic Hockey.  Next weekend will be the last weekend of regular season games for the WCHA and the NCHC, and in two weeks it will be the last weekend of regular season games for the Big Six, or Ten, or whatever.  Along the way conference tournaments will be fired up in various configurations that allow for their various sizes, conference championships will be determined, and so will the sixteen teams for the NCAA tournament.  It seems as thought the top ten ranked teams look like they are close to sure bets for the NCAA tournament at this point.  And teams that are ranked between eleven and nineteen  seem to have a shot at making it (of these nine, only five at most will make the NCAA, assuming that the current top ten all go).  The upper tier teams, in this range of teams, should make it if they don’t drop some key games here at the end and in their conference tournaments, and that possibility of these teams losing games keeps the others in the lower tier in this range alive and in the hunt as well — these nine teams are Cornell, Providence, Michigan, Notre Dame, Yale, Colgate, Vermont, Maine, and Mankato.  Of course with the auto-bid status of conference tournament winners, some of this goes right out the window in the event a conference tournament or two were to be won by a surprise team — teams that looked like NCAA tournament teams would be bumped out to make room for these conference champions.  At any rate, it’s too early to be counting chickens that are only eggs right now, and it’s more useful to just be aware of who is in the hunt.

This weekend half of the top twenty will be involved in top-twenty matchups, starting with #1 Boston College hosting #14 Notre Dame for one game Saturday night; #3 Union will travel to play one at #15 Yale Friday night; and the next three are all huge in terms of potential impact on standings of teams for tournament seedings and NCAA consideration:  #5 St. Cloud State will host #10 North Dakota for two games (should be just carnage on the ice); #7 UMass-Lowell will travel to play two at #17 Vermont (should be nasty); and #12 Providence will travel to play two at #18 Maine.  Anything can happen at this late stage of the season; can’t wait to see what happens.

North Dakota is now a top ten team and they have a serious matchup this weekend with #5 St. Cloud State.  But what do you know about them?  The University of North Dakota was founded in 1883, six years before North Dakota became a state.  Classes were first conducted there on September 8, 1884.  There are 12,000 undergraduate student at UND, and another 3,000 graduate students.  The campus sits on 550 acres in the middle of Grand Forks, North Dakota, which has a population of 53,000, and a metro area population of 99,000.  Incorporated in 1881, Grand Forks was founded in 1870 on the banks of the Red River, which can become mighty and unruly:  It last flooded in April/May of 1997, filling all of the town with water and causing the University to cancel classes for the rest of the school year.  And you want to talk about cold — the average low there in December is 3 degrees, January -3, and February 2.  The record low there is -42.  Brrrrrrr.  And I think they’ve had a chilly winter there this year.  Notable alumni include NBA coaching legend Phil Jackson, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, 1980 Hockey Olympian Dave Christian, and current NHL players Jonathan Toews, Zach Parise, and T.J. Oshie.  UND is the second largest employer in the state, after the U.S. Air Force.

On the sports front, the teams at UND do not have a nickname.  You might recall UND was in a legal argument for a couple/few years — it led to a statewide vote in which the voters elected to walk away from the nickname “Fighting Sioux.”  No new name will be chosen before June of 2015, and wouldn’t you love to see them come back with “Fighting Sue,” “Fighting Soo,” or to invent a new word, and come back with “Fighting Sough?”  Keep the headdress as the logo, or a tomahawk.  Just as long as they don’t come back with something dumb, like the “Meadowlarks.”  How about “Fighting Tribe,” “Fighting Warriors,” “Proud Tribe,” or “Proud Warriors?”  Come on, North Dakota, you guys can figure this thing out.  Now, about their colors . . . . the official colors of the University of North Dakota are . . . . green and pink.  Yep.  I’m not kidding.  Then they have what they call their “common colors” of green, white, and black.  The UND hockey team plays at the Engelstad Arena, which seats 11,640.  It was named for Ralph Engelstad, a UND alum who funded its construction, who was an ardent supporter of the “Fighting Sioux” nickname, and who also had a great, and rather curious interest in certain parts of modern German history . . . .   UND Hockey has won seven NCAA Championships, and was established as a DI independent in 1929, but was disbanded in 1936; it was reestablished in the 1946-47 season, and in 1951 joined the MCHL, which became the WIHL in 1953.  UND went independent for the 1958 season, and then joined the WCHA in 1959.

UND is coached by Dave Hakstol, now in his tenth year as head coach, who played there from 1989 to 1992 as a defenseman, scoring ten goals and adding thirty-six assists in his UND career.  He went on to play professionally in the IHL from 1992 to 1996, and then went on to coach from 1996 to 2000 in the USHL.  He then became an assistant coach, then associate head coach, for UND, starting in 2000, until he was named head coach in 2004.  He is the only DI coach to have a winning record in every season he has coached, and has coached the team to twenty-five win seasons in six of his first nine seasons, and to a thirty-win season in 2010-11, when the team ended at 32-9-3.  In his nine seasons to date, his teams have two conference regular season championships, four conference tournament championships, nine NCAA tournament appearances, five appearances in the Frozen Four, and one appearance in the championship game.  Not bad, Dave.  The roster this year is pretty balanced, but leans a little young in terms of experience, with four seniors, seven juniors, seven sophomores, and seven freshmen.  Of the twenty-five, two are transfers (from St. Cloud State, and Alabama-Huntsville), three are straight from high school — with all three from the US Under-18 program, and twenty are from elite junior league teams.  So far this year the team is ranked #10 and has a record of 18-9-3.  And who wouldn’t want to be in St. Cloud, Minnesota this weekend to see what happens when they face #5 St. Cloud State for a pair of games?

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

[table id= 84 /]

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

— Tom