Keith scoops:
>There is an idea being passed around among the coaches that involves merging
 the
> WCHA and the CCHA into one big SUPER-CONFERENCE. The philosophy is that the
> schools should be working *together* to solve problems. I guess they see the
> WCHA and CCHA competing against each other to each other's detriment.
 
Well, I agree that they should be working together as conferences instead
of against each other.  But working together - against who?  If you want to
carry this to its conclusion, I believe *all* schools should be working
together regardless of conference - but it's not too realistic to expect
that all of DivI will become one big conference.
 
A move such as this would make sense, partly because it would reunite all
of the Big Ten DivI hockey-playing schools.
 
I see two main reasons the WCHA and CCHA need to work together, but I'm
not sure that uniting the conferences is a necessary means to that end.
1. NCAA hockey schools need to work together to put up a unified front
  against those who wish to enact NCAA legislation that hurts them.  But
  in this case, not only do the WCHA & CCHA need to work together, so do
  the Eastern schools.
2. There is too much competition among leagues as far as team selection
  for the NCAA tournament.  This league thinks it deserves more teams than
  that league, that league is afraid of getting fewer teams in than this
  league.  Although the situation has improved in recent years, we are still
  far from the ideal situation in which the 12 most deserving teams in DivI
  would make the tourney.  Fewer leagues means less interleague competition
  for things like tourney team selection, which should be among teams and
  not leagues.  Or would we now have competition among the four divisions of
  this super-conference?
 
>If this were successful, the eastern teams would be expected to unite to make
> Division I college hockey a 2 MEGA-conference show.
 
Expected and reality are two different things as we all know...although
relations between the ECAC and HE have improved to the point that HockeyFest
will be attempted :-) for the third straight year, there are still deep
rifts that make such a move impossible, I believe.  The big one is the
radical disagreement over admissions standards and scholarships.  Some type
of compromise would need to be worked out there.  This is a problem not
faced by the WCHA & CCHA.
 
 
- mike