bale31

msu was down 2 with 4 minutes left. Nothing to lose At that point.

msu played like garbage and didn't look like they wanted to be there. Bsu on the other hand, skated hard and took advantage of every opportunity. Williams was pulled in the 1st. MSU gave up at least 5 odd man rushes. Just a bad all around efforT. I think und pretty much locked up the #1 overall seed tonight.

Yep.....kato had a huge lead on the fiEld. If I remember correctly for a while the difference between kato and und was approximately the same as what it was between und at #2 and the #6 team. Kato's sos is just about the same as und's so when kato had 3 more wins, there was a huge cushion built in. That cushion is now gone after that weekend.

For other schools they may make an exception, but for Notre dame there is way too much more at stake. I know they did it for johns hopkins, bit the schools/programs are just too different to use that as a precedent. For notre dame it has to be all or nothing or they would have added them for basketball long ago.

Sounded like it. Just repeating what Hastings said. Rumor going around was that it was food poisoning though. I can ateat that whatever it was going around wad highly contagious and ridiculously violent. My wife, 3 kids and I all had it. It sucked. Bad

Nope, mostly injuries. They were down to 9 forwards half way though the game last night. Three injuries last night. One guy was left in kato due to sickness and another one didn't dress due to it. For what it's worth, Hastings said the game earlier this year was truly a bug. It lasted well into the following week and wasn't bad food or a bender. It lasted too long to be those.

Kato dressing 11 forwards tonight. The 4th line is 2 defensemen, one of which has played 2 games this year. Its gonna have to be a grinder tonight.

As an outsider, I'm not sure what the problem with what he said is. UND swept a bad team and the schedule will get harder. How does stating the obvious constitute hatred?

In my opinion, the atmosphere sucked on saturday. I think the main event was on friday night. The msu crowd was ready to pop on saturday, but there was very little chance for that to happen. And yes, the crowd was either really getting behind Jon jutzi (yooo-tzi) or booing. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Agreed, but from a revenue standpoint it won't make much difference. They are session tickets, not game tickets. All mn and msu season ticket holders already had tix so those are already included. My guess is that the differeceived would be minimal at best. The championship game was sparse, but to be honest, better than I expected. Funny story, we got to the arena at the beginning of the third period of the umd-mn game on saturday. We would have come earlier, but keeping 3 kids under the age of 6 controlled in that tight of a space for 6 hours wasn't gonna happen. When we got there a couple of 50+ year old gopher fans were in our seats. They just couldn't figure out why so many mankato fans were coming when "their game doesn't start for another hour" so we shouldnt be coming and kicking them out of our seats. They moved up a row and proceeded to get kicked out of their seats in about 10 real timw minutes. So what's the point of that anticdote? This tournament is going to continue in this direction because gopher fans are generally going to only go to their game and don't understand why everyone else doesn't do the same. The time of the game doesn't matter, only whether they are playing. Funny story #2. There was one thing that everyone in the arena agreed. They showed a guy on the big screen wearing a UND jersey. It was probably the loudest crowd reaction I head all day on Saturday. I have no point to that other than I found it funny and thought you all would appreciate the "love for und".

Haha...yep. Stupid smart phones.

It can't happen. The whole tourney is a way to get a regular season scheduling arrangement complete. The gophers get a 2.5 to 1.5 scheduling arrangement with each school and all of the other schools get additional income that they wouldn't otherwise. The gophers NEED to be in the tournament or it fails. It's a non-starter that is fun to taunt gopher.fans with, but doesn't make a lick of sense. As for the "Gopher rule", I personally don't care. It's not really going to change the attendance/revenue since it's a session ticker not a per game ticket. If you want this to be considered a legitimate tournament you can't impose it. Also, people talk how that's how it was in the final five, but it was only that way for firat round games. It wasn't that way for the championship. If you invoke it, i think that also causes the tourney to fail. The current arrangement is the only realistic way to make it work with 5 schools. Beyond this, it's back to every school for themselves and that's not a good situation for anyone.

Blemish I is badly outplaying everyone right now. Msu didn't look like it belonged on th same rink yesterday. Kudos to them for a darn good performance this weekend.

I understood why they let the play go at first, but when the puck got out to the blue line and the gophers were just passing it back and forth, you gotta blow the whistle. Williams thought he was making a good play and turned out as a good one (results wise) but he never should have been put in that situation.

Yeah...not sure what got into the ref's heads during the last period. It was like the one dude wanted the spotlight. The other ref forced him to call the match minors earlier and both were bogus calls. He was a minimum of 80 feet away and made a call on themavs when the play was 10 feet in front of the other dude. Ref A makes the call and ref B says says no it wasn't a penalty and basically forces ref A to even it up. It was dumb. They let the teams play for 2 periods and then decide they want to get some attention so they started calling everything.

I know it was. Mine was tongue-in-cheek too. I should know better than to not include a smiley face when people don't know my sarcastic nature. My bad.

u Haha....kinda like your team is mostly Canadians, eh?

Heck of a game by my boys. Probably should have/could have been 6 or 7 to 2. Gophers look like they've quit. Too much pure, individual talent to be that lazy.

Reading a bit more, I think that's what the suspension is for. Leaving the bench.

Letteiri out for friday night game due to the scrum.

Point is though....you're crazy if you think those voters are watching all the teams theyre voting for and if they are it's only 2-3 games. It's just not possible. The more likely scenario, they're reading box scores, looking at pairwise/krach/rpi and making their best judgement. MSU has 4 losses on the year. 3 of them to teams ranked in the top 8. They are scoring almost 4 goals a game. Had a stretch of over 400 minutes if not trailing (8+ games) and play solid defense (only giving up 21 shots per game). With all of that combined, voting for them seen or unseen is a pretty valid judgement.

couldn't you make that argument about any team though? How many people saw Bu play when voting for them? MTU? MN? UND?

There is no "minnesota rule" for this tourney. 3:00 3rd place. 7:00 championship. Teams don't matter.

You are correct mafiaman. The Mavs take on the gophers in the night game. I, personally, am cheering for a all-WCHA matchup on Saturday night, attendance be damned.

My opinion here is certainly unsolicited and probably unwanted, but as someone who has no allegiance to the NCHC or Big Ten I think it gives a bit of a different perspective. I also say this not as someone who wants to pick a fight. I've been relatively welcomed here and don't really want to wear out my welcome cause there are very few places to talk about college hockey. Now that my disclaimers are out of the way... I think MACtion is 100% right. Everything that's happening in college hockey and any other sport not named basketball or football, is because of football. Football, especially, is what makes moeny for schools and keeps all of the other sports afloat in the 5 power conferences. Without football, the old WCHA would still be in tact because BTN wouldn't make financial sense and neither would any other conference affiliated networks. No one is saying that a school needs to have a power conference football team, but the reality is that is what makes a difference. I think the problem with why there are so many disagreements about this is that it's hard for hard-core college hockey fans to understand why the names Arizona State, Penn State, and Notre Dame mean more than names like North Dakota and Miami (OH). They mean more because casual fans and people that may flip on a hockey game by happenstance will do it for the former, but not the latter. There was a comment that ESPN would want to put on a UND or Miami game first because there will be a full arena and you'll be able to hear the crowd on TV. The problem is that no one would hear it on their TV because no one would turn it on. That's what matters. Hard-core college hockey fans will turn it on, but they are going to seek it out regardless. The people that would expand the pie will not seek it out and won't flip it on by accident. That would be like any of us flipping on a volleyball game by Western Kentucky for anything other than the spandex. It just won't happen. As for what conference Arizona State ends up in (and I don't necessarily think it's a lock that it's the NCHC), it lends instant credibility to that league. If it's the WCHA, they jump in front of the NCHC from a national, casual viewer's perspective. That's not to say I think they will end up there, but those are the stakes in my opinion. Now, there is the question about Pac12 hockey. If it happens, I think it will happen sooner rather than later. "Let's Play Hockey" has been all over this story. They were the ones that first started the conversation about ASU about a week before it was announced. They are also talking about Arizona, Stanford and USC now and Bill Robertson is meeting with USC before the first of the year, apparently. Again, I think it happens sooner rather than later. Who knows what that means for the current conferences though.