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.

Things are about to get interesting in the stands at Boston University this season, as the school’s Dean of Students, Kenneth Elmore, has announced a new policy to kick out of the rink those who use swear words, racist or sexist comments.

It’s only the latest volley fired in a battle that has raged for years at BU and revolves primarily around fans’ use of the third of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” to attack rival Boston College, whether the Terriers are playing BC that night or not. Apparently the obscenities launched at BC during the Eagles’ 5-0 trouncing of BU in the NCAA Northeast Regional last March got the attention of everyone including the NCAA itself, and as a result the administration at BU is taking its crackdown to a new level. Several requests over the years even from revered head coach Jack Parker to the fan base have gone largely ignored, so the administration hopes the threat of being booted from the rink will do the trick.

At first glance, this is an issue that just doesn’t seem that important, yet it garnered a segment of its own on a popular afternoon drive time AM radio talk show in the Hub yesterday. Is this a battle the BU administration can even win? Once you start down this road, where do you stop? With students who regularly attend sporting events ranking among the most loyal supporters later on as alumni, is BU shooting itself in the foot with some of its potential future donors? But what about today’s alumni, who already give a lot of money and have a right to expect that when they attend a game at their alma mater — often with their spouse and young children — that they won’t have to deal with things like this? And what about fans like the BU student quoted in the Globe piece, who said “sports won’t be fun anymore” if the crackdown on profanity succeeds — does it have to involve profanity to be fun?

Overall, this has been going on for so many years that it’s probably less of a surprise that BU made this move than that it took them this long. Still, you have to wonder what’s going to happen the first time they make the decision to kick someone out — particularly with BU’s Agganis Arena being one of the few college hockey rinks left where alcohol is served to patrons. Somehow I don’t think this is the last chapter to be written in this story.

Adam tossed this one in front of us a week or two ago and we all kind of shrugged, but several weeks later and still no word on the University of British-Columbia’s pending application to join the NCAA. CSTV’s Rink Rat, Elliot Olshansky breaks it down a bit further, taking a look at some of the conference and recruiting scenarios UBC and other teams might face should their application get approved.

You know it’s a slow time of year when dggoddard over at Lets Go DU, an always enjoyable blog / Colorado College bashing site, takes the time to breakdown the 2006 NCAA Champion Wisconsin Badgers championship ring. Of course he couldn’t help but put up comparison shots of Denver’s 2004 AND 2005 rings as well. Cubic Zirconia has never looked so good!

An interesting article today on Yahoo! Games providing some details on the new NHL 07 for the XBox 360, which should be pretty amazing, featuring a new control scheme that should create the most authentic ice hockey game since NHL 94′ for the Genesis. (Bleed Gretzky! Bleed!)

Of note in the article, at least three members of development team played NCAA Division I hockey or higher. The only identifiable name was Jason Wong, who played goalie for Dartmouth in the late 90’s. Still, the mention of some college hockey blood as part of the development squad can only mean that we have been successful in infiltrating the EA regime and that we’ll see EA NCAA Hockey ’15 someday.

College Hockey News’ new blog promises to be a gathering point of the college hockey community, a way to keep up with the pulse of what’s going on, and a conversation piece. Enjoy.