It's really endlessly amusing to me that some people think a BTHC would launch and then instantly become such a dominant force in college hockey that the other teams might as well just give up. It's like combining the WCHA superiority complex with a Big 10 superiority complex.
What evidence do we have that a BTHC would even become the best conference right away, let alone far and away destroying everyone?
The Big 10 is at best the 4th best conference in football and the 3rd best conference in basketball. It does pretty well in Olympic/non-revenue sports but not nearly as well as the ACC and the PAC 10.
Meanwhile, Penn State, the team that's supposedly triggering this mudslide that will ruin everyone not in the Big 10, has been playing basketball forever and I don't think they've ever even made it to the Final Four. Why do we assume they're going to just start playing hockey and instantly be good?
The other Big 10 teams in college hockey, while good, aren't exactly everyone's overlords-
Michigan hasn't brought home the big hardware in quite a while. Minnesota... yeah, they've really been setting the world on fire the last few years. Wisconsin sure looked superior to everyone else in Detroit! Ohio State is basically the living proof that the theory some people have about Penn State - drop in a big-name athletics program, and BOOM! great hockey team - is flat out wrong.
You mean to tell me that taking Minnesota and Wisconsin - good teams, but not titanic overlords of college hockey by any stretch - and moving them away from regular games against Denver and North Dakota and toward regular games against Ohio State and an expansion Penn State, is somehow going to make MN and WI dominant?
I support the foundation of a BTHC on the grounds that it will hopefully open up expansion slots for a few new teams (CIS schools?) to jump into NCAA hockey in a few years in established conferences. But let's not think that a BTHC would dominate college hockey. I'll keep my money on BC, BU, Maine, UNH, Miami, NoDak and Denver to continue to compete with and often beat out Minny, Wisco and Michigan just as they do now.
