Elliot is CSTV.com's hockey editor and runs his Rink Rat hockey blog on CSTV.com. E-mail here!
When Michigan State won the NCAA title in April, it was more than a victory for the Spartans, who battled valiantly against better-regarded opposition to win that title. It was also a victory for MichiganState's conference, the CCHA, and Spartans head coach Rick Comley was the first to point that out, having brought home the conference's first national championship since Michigan won it all in 1998.
"I want to congratulate [CCHA commissioner] Tom Anastos," Comley said in the press conference immediately following his team's championship victory. "This is a win for MichiganState, but this is also a win for the CCHA. College hockey is a very difficult battlefield right now. I got a lot of phone calls from coaches before I came here about the importance of our league, and the respect that we've worked so hard and he's worked so hard for. He is a Spartan, but he's also the commissioner of the CCHA, and he's a big part of this trophy."
"It was good for MichiganState to win it last year," Michigan head coach Red Berenson said, "because the last team to win it was Michigan in '98, and then before that it was Michigan in `96. So, the last 10 years, or close to 10 years, we've been conspicuously absent. Now, we've been in the tournament every year, and Michigan State most of the time. We've always had two or three teams, and I think we had five teams one year, but none of us made it to the Frozen Four. It was good to see MichiganState win it last year."
Fast forward seven months, and the CCHA is looking like a big winner once again. The Spartans sit at No. 3 in the latest USCHO/CSTV Division I Rankings, and find themselves looking up at two conference rivals in No. 1 Miami - the Spartans' opponent Thursday and Friday nights at Munn Ice Arena - and No. 2 Michigan. Adding in No. 10 Notre Dame gives the CCHA four of the top 10 teams in the nation.
In addition, the top three players in the latest CSTV.com Hobey Baker Watch all come from the CCHA: Michigan's Kevin Porter, MichiganState's Tim Kennedy and Miami's Ryan Jones. It appears that the CCHA has reclaimed its rightful place among the nation's top conferences.
However, closer examination shows that work remains to be done. While the RedHawks, Wolverines, Spartans and Fighting Irish have a combined record of 33-7-0 so far this season (22-3-0 in CCHA play and 11-4-0 outside it), the fifth through 12th-place teams in the conference have not fared nearly as well. The combined record for Bowling Green, Ferris State, Nebraska-Omaha, Western Michigan, Northern Michigan, Lake Superior State, Alaska and OhioState is 21-43-2.
Of course, given that those 22 CCHA wins for the top four teams had to come from somewhere, a certain disparity is to be expected in overall records.
"I think we have to wait and see," Berenson said. "Northern Michigan is off to a tough start. They're 2-8, and they beat Michigan Tech earlier in one of their games. Of their eight losses, two of them are against Miami, two of them are against Michigan and two of them are against MichiganState. The schedule has been tough on them. Even LakeState, they've only played two league games, and that was at Notre Dame. Alaska, they've only played four league games, two at Michigan, and two at home against MichiganState."
However, remove the 11-30-0 conference mark from the equation, and those eight teams hold a less-than-impressive non-conference record of 10-13-2. Compared to a WCHA that boasts eight of the top 20 teams in the USCHO/CSTV Division I Rankings - including three teams that have beaten preseason No. 1 North Dakota - the CCHA does not appear to have as much depth.
It's not something that has happened overnight, either. While a CCHA team hadn't appeared in the Frozen Four since 2003 and hadn't made it to the championship game since Michigan's win in 1998, the story extended further. Northern Michigan has made only three NCAA tournament appearances since winning the national championship under Comley in 1991. Lake SuperiorState has had three winning seasons since its last Frozen Four appearance in 1996. Bowling Green has posted just four winning seasons and one .500 mark since last making the NCAA tournament in 1990. FerrisState's Chris Kunitz-led run to the NCAA tournament in 2003 remains the program's lone NCAA appearance.
Michigan associate head coach Mel Pearson identified part of the problem in a CSTV.com article last December, when he said, "In Ontario, which has traditionally been a pretty strong recruiting base for a lot of teams, 10 years ago they didn't have the [Ontario Hockey League's] Sarnia Sting or the Barrie Colts or the Brampton Battalion or the Mississauga IceDogs, so all of sudden, you have major junior taking some of those kids at a younger age."
That 2002-03 FerrisState team that won the CCHA regular-season title boasted nine players from Ontario. The 2007-08 edition has two. In addition, the Bulldogs lost prized recruit Pat Maroon, a St. Louis native, to the OHL's London Knights over the summer, while Bowling Green lost goaltending recruit Josh Unice, another American, to the OHL's Kitchener Rangers.
"The CCHA, the majority of the kids are Ontario kids or Detroit kids or Chicago kids," said Alaska head coach Doc DelCastillo, who, as an assistant coach, helped build Nebraska-Omaha into an NCAA tournament team in its first decade as a program. "In the Ontario Hockey League, decisions need to be made a lot earlier than in the past."
"When I was at Lake SuperiorState," Notre Dame head coach Jeff Jackson said, "we were able to recruit some pretty prime players out of the provincial junior league in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and B.C. Now, so many of those kids are spoken for by the time they're 14 years old, whether it's through the WHL or the OHL or even college hockey programs."
However, the effects of major junior expansion go beyond the players who aren't coming to play college hockey in the U.S. It also has to do with the ages of the players who are coming.
"When I was at Lake SuperiorState," Jackson said, "recruiting a kid right out of high school was rare. Usually, a kid played a year, two years, three years of junior hockey before they played college hockey. Now, we're recruiting kids when they're bantams, when they're sophomores, and even freshmen in high school. I'm not saying it's healthy; in fact, I think it's not healthy. We're involved in it because we have to be.
"We recruited older players at Lake Superior. I wish we could recruit more older players here. The thing is that anybody who's an elite level player is generally spoken for by the time he's 17."
All of that said, Notre Dame, because of its national name recognition as a university and as an athletic program, has an advantage going forward. Likewise, Nebraska-Omaha is well located to draw from the United States Hockey League, the top junior league in the U.S., and Alaska draws primarily from western Canada, which continues to produce top Division I talent in high numbers.
"Each place that you're at, you have to recruit to your strengths," DelCastillo said. "Right now, in Alaska, our strengths are in western Canada, and we need to continue to build on that. At Omaha, being so close to all the USHL teams, we used that to our advantage."
Where things will go as those programs continue to develop - including Miami, which has six Michigan natives, five players from Illinois, and three from Ohio on the roster - remains to be seen. Berenson, however, is encouraged.
"It's good to see Notre Dame emerging as a potential top team in the country," Berenson said, "and also Miami. They've been an emerging program in the last few years. They're the real deal."
In the meantime, some of the questions of depth will be answered within this season as teams play more and more games within their leagues, while other questions will be answered over the years to come.
"You're going to have teams under .500," Berenson said, "You have to. That'll sort itself out in the WCHA too, and I'm not here to say our league is better than theirs. I think our league is getting better because of the Notre Dames and the Miamis. We'll have to wait and see."
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