You know it’s been a slow week when the biggest press release to hit the wire was the announcement of the schedule of this year’s weekly USA Today Hockey Rankings.

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Captains have been leading practices for a little over a week now and coaches are starting to get into the mix. And it’s only nine days until the University of Alaska-Fairbanks takes the ice against the U-18 Development Team to unofficially open up hockey season.

The blogosphere has been abuzz recently getting ready for the season. Western College Hockey continues to dig through their CCHA previews, as well as some interesting CCHA and WCHA situational comparisons. Hockey East Blog did the same thing early in the month, and our own Brett Gobe is breaking down the ECAC over at the Clarkson Hockey Fans Blog. We even have Atlantic Hockey previews going on with the newly established RIT Corner Crew blog.

For those of you into the Women’s game, the USCHO pre-season poll is out with defendin champion Wisconsin leading the way, taking 13 of 14 first place votes along with the other usual suspects. Last year’s strong Mercyhurst squad comes in at 5th, and surprisingly a Hockey East squad, Boston College comes in at #10. We’ll come back to this in a month to see what kind of impact the Olympians return on the rankings and game in general.

Lets Go DU found some choice YouTube videos over at Boston University which deserves some mentioning. These will likely go to supplement various arguments around hockey forums across the country.

Apparently everyone else is talking about some guy that shares the same name as a musician, but I challenged myself not to address it any further in this posting.

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 - 11:20 am | Notes, Thoughts, Ramblings