It’s been the topic of the men’s college hockey season since January, when Denver coach David Carle used his platform to openly advocate for a change to the NCAA Tournament format in men’s hockey.
What does Carle want? He wants top seeds to host games in the first two rounds before the last teams standing head to a neutral-site Frozen Four. He and other supporters see this as the year to make headway on a change, with the 2027 and 2028 Frozen Fours and attached regionals up for bid.
I’ve mostly stayed silent on the topic over the years, writing once in 2013 about my hope that the NCAA would once again openly allow campus sites to bid on regionals. I decided not to beat my head against a wall on the topic because, frankly, I didn’t see a change coming. There didn’t appear to be nearly enough support among coaches — who, as we’ve discussed before, hold a lot of power — to change the system.
Now, it seems that is changing. Is this the year we see an overhaul? No clue, but Naples is coming, and I expect some news on this topic, one way or another.
8 THOUGHTS
1. As I wrote in 2013, the system remains broken. Yes, we’ve seen some big hits. Allentown was sold out for a Penn State-Michigan regional final in 2023. Boston University and Cornell drew a nice crowd in Manchester, also in 2023. Loveland was packed for UMD and Denver in the 2022 regional final.
But then we have to think about the dumb luck involved. What happens if Michigan Tech and Quinnipiac win in Allentown instead of Penn State and Michigan? What happens if that Manchester final is Denver and Western Michigan instead of BU and Cornell? What if UMass-Lowell — which had a lead in the third period — beats Denver in Loveland and moves on to play UMD, instead of the hosts moving on?
Empty buildings. That’s what happens. Regional finals, some of the season’s most important games, played in front of 1,500 people if we’re lucky.
If you watch enough college hockey, you know we can do better. At a time where we’ve seen one power conference take its tournament to campus sites, and a second set to follow in 2026, we continue to insist on playing our biggest games in front of some of the smallest crowds those teams will play in front of over the course of years.
2. Take UMD. The Bulldogs routinely average 6,000+ fans at Amsoil Arena for home games. When North Dakota or Minnesota visits, that number usually eclipses 7,000 in a building that does not have that many seats.
In Loveland, 3,138 people paid to see UMD and Michigan Tech in the first round of the 2022 tournament. The building seats 7,200 for hockey.
In 2019, UMD’s regional games in Allentown (capacity 8,500 for hockey) drew crowds of 3,763 and 3,561, not enough to fill the building if you combined them.
Go back to 2015, when UMD went to Manchester (capacity around 10,000 for hockey). The Bulldogs played the Gophers in front of an announced 5,123 (many of whom left after seeing top seed BU win the first game of the day, leaving maybe 1,000 to watch the rivals play in the NCAAs for the first time ever) before playing BU in front of 4,721.
And these are just a few examples. For every good crowd, there are usually one or two that are putrid, because of location or pairings or some other factors.
3. Then you throw on other NCAA sports. Wisconsin packs the UW Fieldhouse when it hosts volleyball regional matches. So do places like Nebraska and Texas. There are 16 baseball regionals, and games involving the hosts are routinely packed. Women’s basketball plays its first two rounds on campus sites and draws exceptionally well at most of them.
These are positive experiences for student athletes that we don’t always replicate in men’s hockey. And all you have to do is look at women’s hockey to see the impact it can have. They’ve had their quarterfinal games at home sites for years now, but the recent expansion to an 11-team field has created three-team regionals at the home sites of the top three overall seeds. They draw crowds and create great atmospheres to play in, and the top seeds have the reward of getting to play at home.
Meanwhile, on the men’s side, we’re left to cross our fingers every year, hoping that high seeds 1) have big fanbases, and 2) are able to play in regionals close to home. Otherwise, the committee is left to consider manipulating the bracket in order to create the kind of atmospheres we all want in this tournament.
4. That brings us to Carle’s proposal. I hate tying this all to him, but the Denver bench boss has been so outspoken on this topic since the calendar flipped to 2024 that it almost doesn’t feel right to discuss it without bringing up his name.
Appearing with Adam Wodon on the CHN Insiders podcast in late January (I’m a Spotify guy, sorry, I’ll trust y’all to figure out how to get this on your platform of choice), Carle laid it out there.
“The top eight host the bottom eight in week one of the tournament,” Carle said. “We remove the bye week from the tournament. The remaining top four host the remaining bottom, and you get to your Frozen Four.”
Carle acknowledges that would likely involve moving the Frozen Four from its current Thursday-Saturday configuration to a Saturday-Monday format, a change that I don’t think would be universally supported by fans who attend the event regularly, but from a rest/recovery as well as logistical perspective, it’s likely necessary to make this all work.
This is simple. It’s something that seems to be gaining support among coaches, including coaches who’ve been stubbornly in support of the current system for many years. That support is not universal, no, but people around the game I’ve talked to have indicated it may be enough to be considered a majority of coaches.
5. What is good about this proposal? For starters, you’re rewarding your top seeds with home games. As Carle pointed out with Wodon, we’ve seen a lot of new facilities pop up in the game. Colorado College recently opened Ed Robson Arena, which is a gem. Rinks have sprouted up with Connecticut and Sacred Heart, which both look really nice. Bentley even has a relatively new facility. Of course, UMD opened Amsoil Arena in 2010, Baxter Arena in Omaha came about a few years later. There’s talk of a new building at Western Michigan, potentially before the decade is out. Rewarding these schools and giving them a chance to showcase their facilities on a big stage is a positive.
Certainly better to showcase a place like Ed Robson than some of the dingy buildings we see used for regionals, especially out east.
(Carle’s perspective on this in 2024 is one that is fueled, in part, by his own experiences this winter. As the head coach of the U.S. World Junior Team, Carle saw his squad win gold by beating Sweden in front of 11,000 largely-hostile fans in Gothenburg. And he says it on the podcast, he’d rather have done that than played Sweden in front of 2,500 fans in Prague or some other neutral country. He told me the same when we talked in February before Denver’s series in Duluth. When Wodon asks him about potentially having to play at a place like Minnesota because of an extremely-thin PairWise margin, Carle makes clear that’s what any competitive athlete would want, rather than play in front of maybe 1,000 fans in Manchester.)
Going to one game a weekend for the first two rounds means more rest/recovery time for athletes, making it more likely that we see teams at full strength come Frozen Four time.
6. Nothing in life is perfect, and neither is this proposal. I see a couple potential snags. First, as Wodon has pointed out about 350 times over the years, the PairWise is far from perfect.
Is it the best system we can use? Probably. The differences are marginal if it is not, and nothing we change to is going to be perfect.
Simply put, the sample size is small, and there aren’t enough cross-regional games. It creates a system where non-conference games — especially so-called East vs West games — are almost overvalued because of the impact they can have on multiple comparisons.
Now we’re going to let that system determine home ice for potential 8v9 first-round games, along with 4v5 second round games, where the margins between the teams are going to be razor thin in a lot of years.
Look, I think I’m okay with it, because everyone knows the system now. We’re already allowing bids to be decided by these margins (look at Colorado College vs UMass just a few weeks ago, where changing one CC result over its 37 games likely puts the Tigers in the tournament), and like Carle said, competitive people are going to thrive in a championship atmosphere, even if the crowd is hostile.
Also, there are logistical challenges with this plan. You need eight separate TV crews to carry games on that first weekend from eight different arenas. Will ESPN want to do that? Will there be a realistic opportunity to farm these broadcasts off to regional outlets (for example, NESN if a game is in a Hockey East building, BTN for a Big Ten barn, etc.)? Further, the current setup of four games Thursday and Friday in the first round is not workable, as those early games are not likely to be well-attended. People still have jobs, after all. Carle wants two games a day Thursday through Sunday, which is fine, but I could see two games Friday followed by three each on Saturday and Sunday also being good.
Also, we don’t want situations where visiting teams can’t get reasonable hotel rooms (most teams are going to want full-service hotels with food available on site) on short notice without going 20 minutes or more from the venue. This won’t be as big a problem with only one team visiting at a time. It’s not a hastily-arranged four-team regional. Just one game. But it should still be talked about before we pull the trigger.
7. I think I’m in favor of Carle’s proposal. I’m concerned about making sure we have a plan to get all the games on television/streaming and accessible to everyone for free (the NCAA women’s regionals are carried by the host’s provider, meaning that in 2024 Big Ten Plus had games from Columbus and Madison, while ESPN Plus carried the Colgate and Clarkson regional games). I want game days and times to be set in a way that local people will want to buy tickets and attend in person.
I’m concerned about making sure everyone’s questions about travel/other logistics are answered in a satisfactory way.
And, yes, I’m concerned about letting something as imperfect as the PairWise determine who gets to play games at home in front of their often-rabid fans.
But it’s time for a change. The next bid cycle is only two years (2027 and 2028). Even if the subsequent cycle is three years as has been reported, this gives us plenty of time to evaluate and adjust if something is not working.
College hockey is woefully behind other NCAA Tournaments in fan interest and overall buzz. At a time where more and more of the college championships are finding their way onto over-the-air ABC (volleyball, women’s basketball, FCS football, gymnastics, and even some of the softball regionals/World Series games), no one is dreaming of such a scenario in college hockey. We can’t even get the national championship game on ESPN anymore because the viewership doesn’t justify it. The sport has so much growth potential, but none of it will ever be realized playing games in poorly-lit, half-empty neutral buildings.
8. The upcoming coaches’ meetings in Naples will include plenty of other conversation. UMD coach Scott Sandelin was with me on my radio show Tuesday, and while he didn’t want to get into too many specifics, he did offer up some thoughts on what will be discussed.
–> Will major junior players be allowed to play college hockey? There’s been speculation that the presence of NIL in college sports will eventually mean that players in the Canadian major junior system (the Canadian Hockey League) will no longer be ineligible for college hockey. Sandelin said he wants a discussion on the pros and cons before he commits to either side of this issue, but he acknowledged “some people have opened my eyes to maybe we should have a bigger player pool.”
Obviously, guys like Connor Bedard or Connor McDavid are not going to suddenly start playing college hockey. But this would create another option for CHL players who exhaust their junior eligibility, are not quite ready for pro hockey, but are maybe ready for a better challenge than Canadian college hockey can provide. Barring litigation, this is not likely to be resolved this spring, but it does bear watching down the road. It’s clearly on the radars of a lot of U.S. college coaches.
–> In a rule change year, what kind of changes will be made? Sandelin believes they have whittled potential rules change proposals from close to 60 down to around 20. He thinks there will be discussion about going back to the old faceoff rules. They switched to the IIHF faceoff format, where centers are not kicked out of the circle on the initial faceoff violation, and only are admonished. Now, there seems to be momentum to return to the old way, where centers got the boot on that first violation and someone else had to take the draw instead. Certainly, keeping the centers in the circle didn’t speed up the process.
The other change Sandelin specifically mentioned on Tuesday was the removal of the Double Jeopardy rule, where a team that scored on a delayed penalty still got the power play. If you scroll back up to the link I dropped from my 2013 piece on rules changes, I said then that this was dumb, so I’ll be thrilled if it goes away 11 years later. He also has said he expects discussion on the overtime timeout in the regular season.
Sandelin also said there would be discussion on goalie interference and video review. But that seems to be an annual thing. Expect the transfer portal to come up, but I don’t know what can be done about that.
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We’ll have more coverage once we get a better idea how the discussions go in Naples. For now, back to your regularly scheduled offseason. Give that Sandelin interview a listen if you can, lots of good stuff in there about last season, Dominic James’ return, and more.
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