This week is the first of two weeks for the holiday tournaments in college hockey. Five holiday tournaments will happen this week, with three of them starting today.

Let’s take a closer look at the three tournaments, beginning with the first one the Great Lakes Invitational, that starts in a few hours.

GLI:

The Teams: Michigan, Michigan State, Michigan Tech, North Dakota.

The games today: Michigan vs. Michigan Tech (3:05 ET), Michigan State vs. North Dakota (6:35 ET)

Outlook: Both Michigan and North Dakota are red hot. Michigan’s last loss came against Wisconsin on November 29. That same day North Dakota’s last loss happened against Cornell. These are unquestionably the two strongest teams in the field. Michigan State is on one of its worst losing skids in recent memory, while Michigan Tech is coming off a sweep of Northern Michigan. Expect a Michigan-North Dakota final, which could mean a lot of implications in March.

The Badger Classic:

The Teams: Wisconsin, Lake Superior, Harvard, Alabama-Huntsville

Games Today: Lake Superior vs. Harvard (4:07 CT), Wisconsin vs. Alabama-Huntsville (7:07 ET)

Outlook: Since their 0-6-1 start, the Wisconsin Badgers have been red hot, going 9-1-1 in the last two months. Wisconsin should take this. The Harvard vs. Lake Superior game should be interesting as both teams are looking for answers.

Florida College Classic:

The Teams: Colgate, Cornell, Maine, St. Cloud State

Games Today: Colgate vs. Maine (4:05 ET), St. Cloud State vs. Cornell (7:35 ET)

Outlook: This is the most interesting tournament this week. Maine has surpassed expectations up to this point, Colgate will look to gain some momentum as well as St. Cloud State, and Cornell is doing quite well also. Cornell and St. Cloud State should be a great first round game as the matchup features a great offensive attack in St. Cloud State and a potent defensive scheme with Cornell. The Sunshine State could be seeing great hockey after all this weekend.

Other Tournaments:

Ledyard Bank Tournament (Dartmouth, Bemidji State, Army, Massachusetts)

UConn Holiday Classic (Connecticut, Air Force, Quinnipiac, Merrimack)

Tournament Final Predictions:

GLI: North Dakota over Michigan

The Badger Classic: Wisconsin over Harvard

Florida College Classic: Cornell over Maine

UConn Holiday Classic: Air Force over Quinnipiac

Ledyard Bank Invitational: Massachusetts over Dartmouth

Yes, I have broadcasted 128 Minnesota-Duluth men’s hockey games.

Yes, I am continuing to support the program as a season-ticket holder.

Yes, I despise the Minnesota Gophers with every fiber of my being.

However, I am not an idiot. My respect for Don Lucia’s work as a college hockey coach is as high as it gets. Evidence can be found here and here.

The fact that he is a great coach and a wonderful ambassador for the sport doesn’t change the fact that he is capable of being dead wrong.

Evidence of that can be found here.

“I have never discouraged or encouraged [playing football], but that may change now in light of what happened to Zach (Budish, Gopher hockey recruit who suffered a torn ACL playing football) and what happened to Garrett, too,” said Lucia, who also watched recruit Garrett Smaagaard of Eden Prairie miss his senior year of hockey after tearing his ACL in the 2000 Prep Bowl.

Budish’s injury and Lucia’s stance underscore a growing conflict between the two sports. Overlapping schedules, competition for varsity spots and the growing trend of specialization have the relationship between football and hockey, as Hill-Murray activities director and hockey coach Bill Lechner said, “at an uncertain point.”

Kim Nelson of Edina and Vince Conway of Hill-Murray, who coach football at schools where hockey is king, worry that Budish’s injury might make hockey players — particularly elite-level players — reconsider playing football.

Their concerns have merit. Just weeks after Budish’s injury, Lucia received a verbal commitment from an athlete who played both football and hockey.

“We had a talk,” Lucia said. “I said, ‘It’s time to be a hockey player, not a football player.’ He agreed and he’s not going to play football next year.”

I’m all for coaches advising their recruits. I’m not all for coaches telling their recruits not to play football. High school is a time for enjoyment, a time for hanging out with friends, and a not a time to be specializing in one sport over anything else.

To me, coaches who try to steer their recruits to a single sport are afraid. They’re afraid that the kid will start to like a different sport and want to play that instead.

Such fears didn’t overcome anyone in the Minnesota-Duluth program after Matt Niskanen committed there in 2004. Niskanen was a three-sport athlete in high school, playing hockey for the co-op Virginia/Mountain Iron-Buhl program, and playing football and baseball for Mountain Iron-Buhl. He continued to play football and baseball in his senior year, and was a top-notch player in all three sports.

Listen, I’m not trying to hold up Niskanen as some sort of evidence to a greater rule. And I’m not trying to make Scott Sandelin out to be automatically smarter or a better coach than Lucia because he didn’t try to keep Niskanen from playing those sports in his senior year.

But if you ask Niskanen, and I have, the fact that he played all three sports made him a better hockey player and a better person. And you can’t argue with the outcome in either realm. Not only is he one of the better young defensemen in the NHL, but he’s also one of the nicest people you could ever meet, and he truly hasn’t forgotten his roots.

And Lucia is not alone. Around the country, there are coaches trying to dissuade their kids from playing other sports as they grow older. For every Don Lucia, there is a college football coach practically begging his recruits to stop playing hockey or basketball or baseball. And there are high school coaches who go so far as to demand their star players not play any other sport.

These things happen. And they need to stop.

We can’t be in such a hurry to get kids through the developmental stages of sports that we don’t allow them to be kids. Yes, there will be kids like Aaron Ness, a Gophers freshman defenseman who accelerated his high-school education so he could graduate and join the Minnesota program as quickly as possible. But Ness didn’t do that because Lucia told him to. He did it because he wanted to.

And that’s how this should be done. Not with pressure, threats, or even subtle requests from college coaches. If a high-school kid wants to play three sports and star in all three, that should be his decision and no one else’s.

Yes, there is risk.

But there’s also risk in letting that same kid drive to school every day. You don’t see coaches banning their players from driving, do you?

Silly? Absolutely. So is a hockey coach worrying about a potential star recruit getting hurt while playing football, or any other sport.

I’ve always been pleased as punch with the fact that the NCAA doesn’t incorporate polls into the selection process for the NCAA Hockey Tournament.

Of course, it means that the polls are nothing but discussion fodder. But that’s a good thing. Polls should never be more than that. The opinions of human beings should mean nothing when you’re determining who the best hockey teams are. Same goes for football, basketball, baseball, tennis, volleyball, bowling, and any other sport.

We have tournaments and postseasons so we can decide these types of important things on the field of play.

This week, college hockey pollsters are faced with an interesting, difficult, and nearly-impossible dynamic when it comes to WCHA teams (and others, mind you, but I’m going to focus for a moment on the WCHA).

Minnesota State is now 8-5-3. They have impressive wins over Colorado College and North Dakota, but lost twice over the weekend to St. Cloud State, and they also have a loss and a tie against Minnesota.

St. Cloud State sits at 10-6, just swept MSU, but has lost twice to Minnesota-Duluth by matching 5-1 scores.

UMD is unbeaten in their last five. The Bulldogs, now 7-4-5 on the season, chased Colorado College star goalie Richard Bachman with a five-goal second period explosion Saturday. The 7-4 win follows a three-point weekend against North Dakota and a second four-goal win over St. Cloud State.

Who gets ranked where?

Thankfully, it doesn’t really matter. These three teams settle their differences and decide their rankings with their play on the ice. In January, various sites will start to publish their guesses on what the PWR looks like. CHN has already started publishing the KRACH ratings (waiting until everyone has lost one game).

The only day the PWR matters is on Selection Sunday, but it’s always interesting to watch the ebb and flow over the course of the season’s second half. While there are always quirks with logic involved, they aren’t nearly as bad as the quirks with logic that are involved in the polls.

Of course, it’s always easier to except the quirks when you realize the polls don’t matter one lick. It’s nothing but blog and message board fodder to keep us interested until another full slate of games on Friday night.

I don’t think he ever had much chance to win — probably very little — but at least someone at Sports Illustrated sought to nominate someone from the College Hockey ranks as Sportsman of the Year. The someone who did the nominating is Kevin Armstrong, and the someone that was nominated is Boston College coach Jerry York.

York, of course, led the Eagles to their third national title last April, and it was York’s third title as a head coach, giving him more than any other active D-I coach. The nomination also cited how York overcame prostate cancer in 2005.

The winner of the honor was, of course, Michael Phelps, the swimmer who won more gold medals in one Olympics than anyone ever, this year in Beijing.