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Apparently Illinois hockey is going to officially announce it's going to go D1 next week.... Not expecting it, of course, but hopefully the league will drop Notre Dame before the Illini join....


https://twitter.com/USCollegeHockey/status/1125375031943618561

https://twitter.com/JoeMeloni/status/1125388369696047106

Michigan has a pretty tough schedule this year with 2 games each with Clarkson, Lake Superior, Western Michigan (H/A), and at New Hampshire, along with Ferris State in the GLI in non-con play.

Meanwhile, Illinois' still trying to go D1 in hockey by 2022. https://www.uscho.com/2019/06/19/illinois-still-banking-on-new-program-would-join-big-ten-if-rink-built-by-2022/

If it did, how would the resulting realignment shake out? 

I miss the CCHA's scheduling and traditions but I also haven't given up on Big Ten hockey. Our biggest problem here is that we have major scheduling issues as a 7-team league. And going to 8 (assuming Illinois finds the $250MM to build The Yards) doesn't really fix any of those in a satisfactory way. 

At present, with 7 teams, each member plays six opponents four times (2H, 2A). That's 24 games with room for 10 OOC. A reasonable ratio. But the way we have to spread them out makes for long home ice droughts and late-season bye weekends. That sucks!

The problem with Illinoising ourselves into an 8-member league is that then we're stuck with a goofier number: 7 opponents each. If we get there and keep the same format (2H, 2A per opponent), we'll spend 28 of our 34 regular season games in conference. 

6 OOC games isn't much, especially for M and MSU who are indefinitely contracted to play OOC in the GLI. That would leave the whole conference vulnerable to poor pairwise outcomes. That's because this is a high variance sport. An oddball OOC upset of a good Big Ten teams is statistically likely. And there'll be precious few opportunities to make up for it, especially against good OOC teams, before we hide in-conference for the other 28 contests.

Of course, there are different formats -- 

• An unbalanced schedule for 8-teams is one. Where we play unequal H/A games per opponent (2 at one site; 1 at the other). 
• Or we could split into divisions and play divisionmates 2H/2A and cross-divisionmates 1H/1A.
• Or we could begin the season without divisions, play a round robin in the front half, then seed the teams to produce one four-team "A league" and one four-team "B league" and have those groups play in their respective bubbles with only that year's A league vying for the reg season crown. 

But those are all uneven ways to determine a champ.

I guess in that sense, I like the Big Ten but am disappointed we added ND. Not because I'm your common Big Ten anti-ND hawk but because a six-team conference was much more mathematically sound: 5x4 games in-conference with 14 OOC to spare.
 

Okay, so if Wisconsin and Minnesota go to the Nacho, I suppose OSU, ND and the Michigan siblings would have to go to the WCHA. Penn State I guess would shop around the Eastern conferences, none of which would be a great fit really. Or they could just fold I suppose, since they weren't part of the nostalgia to begin with. 

It appears that the Alaska programs are at risk of shutting down regardless due to significant budget cuts. It sounds like UAH is going to try to keep its program, and Arizona State has proven that it is possible to get into the tournament as an independent.

I do think this is actually good for college hockey longer-term, though. The default assumption is that the WCHA defectors all stay together. If that's true, there's still room for it to grow. I know Oakland did a feasibility study to add hockey, and I think it would make a lot of sense because they're not a football school, they have a decent sized student body, and they'd have natural rivalries with the other Michigan schools in the league. I think there are other schools in the Great Lakes region that could be successful in adding D1 hockey as well (eg. Green Bay, Northern Illinois, Toledo)..... The alternative is to add the westernmost schools from the Northeast leagues (Robert Morris, Mercyhurst, Canisius, Niagara), which would then allow other schools in the Northeast to add hockey with a conference to go to. Apparently Navy is seriously considering going D1. Schools like Delaware, Drexel, Penn, Lehigh, Bucknell, Rhode Island, Central Connecticut, and NJIT could all be successful programs, as well..... Beyond that, there are also rumors of some schools out west, including UNLV, going D1.

One guaranteed positive effect of the Big Ten hockey conference is that until its formation, growth of the sport was highly unrealistic. Things are in motion (one might argue: unstable), and that's to say nothing of the traditions lost, but no one can say the sport's growth potential is equal to or less than it used to be. We now have room in multiple conferences and ever more modern templates for how to break in from scratch.