Re: HEY HERE IT IS! Its the UNO season thread!
Absolutely. I don't buy into the idea that Nebraska would ever add hockey.
While I have never heard Tom Osborne speak on the record about this, the only person I know that
has spoken to him about hockey told me that he said they don't have any interest in it. However, that was also pre-Penn State going D-1 and all the Big 10 Hockey talk. UNL has club hockey:
http://www.huskerhockey.com/
They don't even play on campus. They play in Fremont, NE. I'll be up front and admit I know little about them, even though I live in Omaha which is even closer to Fremont than Lincoln is. Why the Huskers don't play at the Icebox (where the USHL Lincoln Stars play), which is walking distance from the Devaney Center, is something I don't know the answer to. To me, this speaks, at some level, to where hockey even is in the UNL hierarchy, if it even is. There has also been an ongoing discourse at Mavpuck about whether ice will even be a part of the Huskers new Haymarket arena:
http://www.mavpuck.com/mpboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8044
In any event, I believe that Trev Alberts completely and totally did the right thing for UNO, long term, and, by default, for the UNO hockey program. I won't waste everybody's time reading my own written defense of this. Instead, read the outside consultant's report (which isn't very long) here:
http://omaha.com/assets/pdf/OW5797313.PDF
..........which far more eloquently explains the rationale for this better than I ever could. The knee-jerk reation to all this here in Omaha has been pretty stupid. Football is clearly a goner under any set of circumstances. I do believe that a case MIGHT be able to be made for the wrestling program continuing in another conference (like 2 other Summit League schools currently do), but I don't know the Title 9 ramifications of that and, believe, me, besides the dollars and cents side of this, that is a big part of the equation here as well.
Yesterday's events certainly explain why there has been no UNO arena announcement as yet as well. We all knew something had to be up. What they need now is a hockey/volleyball/basketball venue now, apparently. That said, while I have never set foot in Sapp Fieldhouse, at a seating capacity of 3500, it is probably unsuitable to a D-1 basketball program, as evidenced by the fact that Trev Alberts said today that basketball is moving to the Omaha Civic Auditorium, the hockey team's former home, ironically.
Happily, I think this may bode well for UNO getting a hockey arena of the size I think they need on-campus, which I believe needs to seat upwards of 12,000 and be modeled along the lines of the Ralph, which UNO officials descended upon en masse when we played up there this season to take a look at it. I think, now, for sure, this was no accident. I don't think that an 8.000 seat arena, in the 3rd largest metropolitan area in the country with D-1 hockey after Boston and Minneapolis, is remotely big enough, particularly since UNO is making a clear statement with yesterday's events that they are a hockey school and that hockey is now, and, will be even more so in the future, the cash cow (pardon the pun) for the university.
As an aside, I think UNO is in the tournament NO MATTER WHAT happens between now and next Sunday short of a WCHA final of Alaska Anchorage/Bemidji State with BSU winning the marbles. I tried a ton of different "reasonable" calculations in the USCHO Pairwise Predictor and I could not "play" UNO "out" no matter what I did, and, believe me, I tried. Anybody else do the same and "play them "out"? If so, how?
Jeez, we've made Dan Bakala look like Dominik Hašek in the eight games we've played with BSU this year and last. I've seen all eight games, home and away, and, I here to tell you, the guy has defied description against us. Coach Blais certainly took note:
http://sports.omaha.com/2011/03/13/mavericks-hope-rough-weekend-wont-put-end-to-amazing-year/
Sigh........
I'm taking at least a little solace in something that North Dakota fan said in their thread quoting something Dean Blais said years ago while coaching there. Words he said to the effect that winning the conference and/or the conference tournament gassed some of his teams to the point they had bad NCAA tournaments. If we are in, and, I think we are, that might bode well for us.
FYI, the real UNO fans were the ones that stuck around to give the team a standing O last night for the stick salute (which, understandably, was a little half-hearted). I am proud to say that I was one of the few thousand that stayed to do so.
This has arguably been the best season in school history. Way to go, UNO. Probably still ain't over.
