TalonsUpPuckDown

Hi, BG guy here again popping in for my yearly engagement with the SiouxSports world. I'm curious as to this group's rankings on the attractiveness of the BG job vs. the Miami job. Which is "better" and why? I'll hang up and listen to your answer.

Student section is always full, they line up 30+ min before the doors open to make sure to get a seat. Our barn is 50+ years old and is one-of-a-kind. You're right on top of the action. Ceiling is all metal and low (and I mean LOW!) so 3000 people sound and feel like 6000. We usually outdraw the basketball team. I have season tickets so I'm there at least once each home weekend. Biggest draws are OSU, Miami State, Western, Notre Dame, Michigan State (basically the MAC and oCCHA blue blood teams). We do home-and-home with various combinations of these guys every year for our OOC schedule. Thanks for the time guys, I don't want to overstay my welcome so I'll hand the mic back to you.

Ohio State has been pissed at them for years and won’t schedule them. They irked us off as well, this is the last year we’re playing them for the foreseeable future.

Sorry for that, force of habit. Miami University has a certain reputation in Ohio where they often times will forget they are a state school like Kent, BG, Ohio State, and even that godforsaken Toledo. Many have gotten in the habit of reminding them. Dampens their self styled “public ivy” image. It’s why I think they’ll never leave the NCHC. This type of hit to their ego would be felt in Australia. Full disclosure: my wife is a Miami State grad. tl;dr version is it’s an Ohio thing.

Hi, your friendly neighborhood Bowling Green interloper here. If you consider Wodon a pundit, here are his thoughts from 2020 on Miami State vacating the NCHC -- take it for what it's worth. https://www.collegehockeynews.com/news/2020/02/19_Forget-the-Name,-New-CCHA.php Here's the relevant paragraph: Bergeron's travel budget was substantially reduced this year so you now end up watching the Redhawks lose to Ferris State and Mercyhurst (bus rides) instead of losing to Vermont and Maine (flights). While I personally doubt a move will happen, it's within the realm of what's plausible. What I don't understand is why you wouldn't offer a Miami State-for-Mankato trade straight up with no penalties. You bring in a team that greatly improves your overall league PWR who will travel well to the Frozen Faceoff (Miami State never will) and you get rid of a geographic outlier. Win-win-win? We once had a 23h Magical Mystery Tour bus ride to Bemidji due to weather and Chicagoland traffic. Swapping out all of the Minnesota schools for Western/Miami State would be a net (edit: travel) positive for us though the Yooper league members would disagree. Thanks for the time.

Touché!!!!

Ice Breaker was just in the Huntington Center. We play there every couple of years. Toledo (my hometown -- mom, dad, sister still live there) is a fantastic IHL/ECHL town but sucks for college hockey. There is zero local interest outside of the local BG alums who wouldn't be caught dead at a UT hockey game. And we draw much better at home than we do in the Huntington Center. UT might change that but only when BG would roll into town. No one in Toledo has ever heard of Ferris State, St. Cloud, Minnesota Duluth, Lake Superior, or Mercyhurst. And aside from the Buckeyes who have done a great job of ensuring they regularly play their smaller Ohio brethren, no other B1G team would put Toledo on their schedule. They'd struggle. And they're having enrollment issues which is odd for an open enrollment university so adding a high cost sport that won't be revenue neutral along with Title IX considerations makes it a non-starter. Which is bad because I'd love to kick the $hit out of them every year but good because they simply suck. And while our barn is old and WAS in a state of disrepair 10 years ago, we've put a few mil into fixing it up including tearing up the concrete last year and redoing all the under ice plumbing. It'll never be the Ralph or Goggin, but disrepair isn't an accurate word to describe the current state of our facilities. Current plans include a revamp of the south end to include luxury boxes and alumni seating - fundraising has already started. That would bring our seating capacity to roughly 5500. So stop reading those Miami State press clippings... ;-) We are not the same program that existed when the last round of realignment took place. When Bergeron, Eigner, and Schutte took over our moribund program they were probably the only three in the country willing to sign up. Fast forward 10 years; Eigner had over 80 applicants for the assistant coaching positions this past summer. Bowling Green hockey is in a very good place right now.

It's a really good question. If you're an FBS school, football runs your athletic department and the reality is that MAC schools simply can't compete with the FCS $chool$. But, due to the current college football landscape, they have to keep trying. Take Miami and BG. Miami is towards the top of the MAC in athletic department expenditures while BG is towards the bottom. However, Miami is also towards the top of the MAC in borrowing from the general fund to cover athletics overruns while BG is toward the bottom. And according to Bergeron, Miami's travel went up $200k in the NCHC's first year. That's not sustainable with all that football cashola being shoveled out the door when neither school sniffs a New Year's Day bowl payday (you can count on two fingers the number of times a MAC team played on New Year's Day). Subsequently, the rest of the MAC schools fall somewhere in the middle but none of them escape the football wars. Heck, Akron built a new football stadium which they don't have the money to pay for -- they ain't startin' hockey... For MAC schools, facilities aren't necessarily the issue...it's football and Title IX. So yeah, ain't happenin'. And Miami and Western aren't "hockey schools," they're FBS football schools. Like BG, Akron, Buffalo, etc. Follow the money.

That's because we ARE better. By a lot. "The Brotherhood" is a bottom third WCHA team right now. And BTW we're better than Western Michigan, too... While there's a lot of bad hockey played in the WCHA, there's also some pretty good hockey played as well. And while time will tell, it shouldn't surprise anyone if the reborn CCHA (or whatever it's called) consistently becomes a 2-bid league after jettisoning the "dead weight."

Zero, zip, nada to all 3 of those schools starting DI. With respect to "MAC Hockey," there's more of a likelihood of a UMass and UConn hockey connection than those three. UMass was a football only MAC school not too long ago and there's been scenarios tossed around where UMass and UConn join the MAC as football only. The consensus from the MAC side is that's non-starter. So yeah, still more likely to see a MAC hockey conference with UMass/UConn than Buffalo, Akron, and that $hithole school 25 miles north of us.

Hi. Bowling Green interloper here. Long time listener, first time caller. Hopefully I can help focus some of the ongoing speculation. The NCHC wasn't a fit for us when Fenton asked if we were interested in applying for membership (this happened at the time Mankato and ASU applied so you can say BG is to blame for Mankato being stuck in the WCHA) and nothing has changed in the interim. BG isn't looking to join the NCHC for the foreseeable future if ever. As an Ohioan I wasn't familiar with UST but the more I hear the more intrigued I am. Now before I hang up and listen to your answer, the juicy rumor floating around northwest Ohio is that Bergeron, who was never enamored with the NCHC, wouldn't mind Miami joining up with the WCHA 7. Personally I find that exceptionally hard to believe, especially since Western is happy where they are -- and you'd expect they'd be a package deal. But there you go. I enjoy reading this forum. Lots of really smart people and great discussion. I see stuff here that isn't duplicated elsewhere. Carry on.