Karen/Greg Ambrose wrote:
 
> Personally I am opposed to campus sites for any round of the NCAA's.  It
> gives incredibly unfair advantage to the home team in what is supposed to
> be a national tournament conducted to show who is truly the champion.  By
> giving (at least this year) Michigan a leg up, I will be shocked if they
> don't make it to Boston.  BTW, what does this say about fan interest in
> Western Hockey?  The fact that the NCAA has to resort to a smallish campus
> site because of attendance questions does not speak well for the general
> love of the sport out there.  I do recall both the 1979 and 1985 NCAA's in
> Detroit when neither Michigan or MSU was involved and the Olympia and the
> Joe respectively were empty.  Perhaps one of,youm CCHA ar WCHA gurus can
> shed some light on this for us.
 
You mean perhaps that in these parts, schools 90 miles apart are (very) close
to each other?  That Minnesota fans would have had to drive 15+ hours to get
to Detroit in 1979?  That UMD fans can add a couple more to get there in
1985?  If you live in Ann Arbor, it's more than an hour to get to the Joe.
(Trust me.  I DID live in Ann Arbor.)  That's the closest D1 hockey school to
Detroit.  People on the east coast never seem to be able to grasp the
distances out here.  As I tried to tell the Mass-Lowell fans when they got
sent to the west regional in 1996, they live closer to East Lansing than I do.
 
Sorry if I'm getting repetitive here, but your question was both insulting and
ignorant.  If you check regular season attendance figures, the top drawing
teams are overwhelmingly western.  This happens for precisely the same reason
that playoff attendance drops.  The fact that the teams are so spread out
means that each is drawing from a larger base (for the most part, the Gophers
don't have to share Mpls/St. Paul with anyone for instance) which has to go
much farther when they are on the road.  Ergo, more home attendance, less road
travel.  I very much suspect that if you stretched HE and ECAC schools over
the same kind of territory, you'd see pretty much the same phenomenon.  As it
is, you could drop the whole area from Orono to Potsdam into CCHA/WCHA
territory and have a lot of room for it to rattle around.
 
J. Michael Neal
 
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