Drop the puck!

Posted by: ron

The first full weekend of college hockey is upon us. How fast time flies!

Many teams have already faced some Canadian counterparts, but I can’t help but be a little disappointed that D-I teams don’t regularly schedule any of their D-III counterparts as their warmup for the regular season, especially after the excitement in college football this season with Appalachian State defeating Michigan, it definitely would be fun to see some of the SUNYAC teams face Clarkson or St. Lawrence, maybe Wisconsin or Minnesota hosting a tilt. Certainly the D-III fans would travel, and it could ignite some local rivalries that once might have been before classification really took over. Also, because they’re NCAA teams, no more of this Canadian rough-housing that the NCAA teams can’t really retaliate against.

Loving the lineup of early season tournaments. All four that are kicking off look like they will be very competitive. The Nye in Alaska is always a wild-card with the travel schedule, but it must be an exceptional experience for the three visitng teams.

Michigan skated away with a big 4-3 OT victory earlier today in the Icebreaker, and Wisconsin took out Notre Dame 4-1 which is a pretty big statement considering consider Wisconsin’s off-season last year and Notre Dame’s huge breakout. Clarkson took revenge upon UMass in OT as well 2-1. Fortunately for the Minutemen their loss won’t end their season.

Enjoy the hockey and let the games begin!

2 Responses to “Drop the puck!”

  1. hkycoch Says:

    My son plays D3 and I asked the coach why they don’t play pre-season games against D1 teams. He said the NCAA no longer allows such games. I agree that it would be a great idea for D3 teams to play pre-season games against D1 opponents. But the games would have to be realistic in terms of who plays who. The top D3 teams could probably be competitive against the bottom half of D1 teams.

    With Canadian colleges exploring the possibility of joining the NCAA at the D1 level, I think the recent games showed overall that the Canadian colleges are not at the level of NCAA D1 teams. Maybe the Canadian colleges could play D3 teams and for the most part be more competitive.

  2. Mike Machnik Says:

    It’s a good idea. The truth is, although the NCAA does not actually disallow games between D1 and D3 teams, there are policies in place that do effectively discourage them.

    For example, there is an exemption to the 34-game limit that allows a D1 program to play a game in the U.S. against a “foreign team” — most schools use this to play a Canadian university. But there is no such exemption for playing a D3 team.

    That means if you play a D3 team, it counts towards the NCAA limit and it’s one less game that you can play against D1 competition. Plus, only games against D1 opponents are considered when selecting and seeding teams for the NCAA tournament. It could be the difference between receiving a bid and staying home. That’s also true, by the way, for D3 teams — they also have the one game exemption to play a foreign (usually Canadian) team. And their tournament seeding is also only based on games within the division. It’s just gotten to where the D1 vs D3 games that we used to see a couple of decades ago, don’t really make sense anymore for either side.