Brian D Helland wrote:
 
> I have to make some comments on this whole debate over the future that
> small schools have in D-I Hockey.  I have been raising these concerns for
> the past couple of years, but I keep being told that I am overreacting or
> I'm "just paranoid".  Well, as a fan of a small school program (North
> Dakota), I believe that we small school fans have every right to fear such
> proposals as a Big Ten Hockey Conference, future involvement in the game
> by E$PN, and the elitist attitudes of some (and I emphasize SOME) big
> school fans towards our programs.  I have said many times that the
> proponents of a Big Ten Hockey Conference are NOT after an Ivy League type
> conference like they claim, but rather a full-fledged big media, big
> $$$$$ conference in the model of the Basketball/Football conferences.  If
> this happens, the Big Ten would become the "big time" and the small school
> programs will become the "small time", and will get garbage-type treatment
> by the media and the big schools.
 
J. Michael Neal replied:
 
>But as a proponent of big 10 hockey, I think I ought to have a chance
>to actually explain why I want to see it.  I have no idea what Brian
>means by an "Ivy League type conference" that we are apparently
>claiming we want to be.  I'm also not sure what the terms full-fledged
>and big media are meant to indicate either.
 
        I believe "Ivy League type conference" means a
league-within-a-league, like the current Ivy hockey arrangement.
 
>Why do I want to see a Big 10 hockey conference?  Because John Whelan
>isn't entirely accurate when he says that hockey rivalries are
>different from those in other sports.  Games against the other Big 10
>schools are what I live for.  No other match-ups get me as excited as
>when the Gophers play Wisconsin, Michigan or Michigan State, even
>though the latter two are non-conference games.  And I can't wait to
>get the chance to play Ohio State this year; we've got 'em in two
>tourneys and if the pairings somehow work out that we don't play them,
>I'm going to be very disappointed.  I just wish we'd had a chance to
>play them back when we knew we could beat them; you know, give them a
>taste of how it feels to be a Minnesota football fan.
 
        So you'd rather play Ohio State than North Dakota or Colorado
College?  I know that with the exception of Harvard, Cornell's biggest
hockey rivals are with non-Ivy schools (Clarkson and RPI).  Now, those
two schools have a lot in common off-ice with Cornell, given that a
lot of science/techie types in New York apply to all three, and
perhaps Cornell is unusual in that with the departure of the Hockey
East schools and Army, there are not a lot of non-Ivy ECAC schools
close to the other hockey-playing Ivies.  But take for example the
Vermont-Dartmouth travel partnership.  Dartmouth is the Ivy team, but
90% of Cornell fans would rather watch a Cornell-UVM game, due to the
rivalry (largely driven by the friction between the fan bases) that's
arisen in recent years.  I'm pretty sure hockey is the only sport in
which Cornell and UVM mean anything more to each other than any other
two random schools in the Northeast.  And with the exception of
agricultural education, I can't think of any academic connections.
 
>The Big 10 schools are natural rivals.  It isn't just that we compete
>in all the other sports to build this up.  With Northwestern being
>sort of the odd case, the Big 10 schools are all of comparable size
>and mission.  They compete for students, faculty and press in subjects
>far beyond the athletic field.  Some of the rivalries between academic
>departments are as fierce as those between football teams.  ECAC fans
>should be able to understand this; though the type of institution is
>very different, they are very similar to each other and compete in
>many of the same ways.
 
        It's funny that you should mention the ECAC, since after some
past tensions, the ECAC-Ivy arrangement has settled into one everyone
seems content with.  Of course, the Big Ten has the disadvantage of
being split across two existing conferences, so without joint
CCHA/WCHA realignment, it's hard to see how something like that could
work out.  Imagine the trouble that would have arisen if the New
England Ivies had left to join Hockey East.  (Of course that wouldn't
have happened, given 1) the reasons for the split and 2) the fact that
the pre-split ECAC was already made up of three divisions, one of
which was just the Ivies.)
 
>I want a Big 10 competition in hockey.  This has increasingly come to
>mean a Big 10 conference.  I would be happy with a system where the
>Big 10 teams stayed in their current leagues and devoted
>non-conference games to establishing a Big 10 champion, but even this
>has been greeted with dismay and angst from everyone else,
 
        Is this true?  The ECAC was unhappy when the Ivies handed out
weekly press releases, but when they agreed to limit it to a champion
and year-end awards, that seemed a suitable compromise.  The only
reason I can think of why someone might object to that sort of Big Ten
championship is that it might be seen as the first step to Big Ten
secession.  (And that it might replace tournaments like the Mariucci
Classic, Badger Showdown and GLI.)
 
> to produce a Big 10 title is going to require a Big
>10 league.
 
        Unless Minnesota and Wisconsin join the CCHA, which would
leave the question of who would host the Final Five.
 
                                         John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                               <[log in to unmask]>
                      <http://www.cc.utah.edu/~jtw16960/joe.html>
 
Attention ECAC:   Eight is Enough--Flush the Final Five!
 
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