Re: Will the Neutral Site College Hockey game takeoff like football?
I attended the Ice Breaker at Kansas City's brand spanking new Sprint Center when UNO hosted it there to start the '12-'13 season (UNO, Notre Dame, Army, & Maine) and you could have had a gunfight in the stands and no one would have been injured. I found myself wondering if we should have even bothered. Zero atmosphere for any of those games. Few UNO fans barely even bothered to drive the 180 miles to see this and they have consistently been a top 5 team in home attendance for the entirety of the program's existence.
There is not enough interest in places that don't already have college hockey close by or are very close to the (right) schools involved that merit doing this. It isn't going to be well attended. NCAA Regionals are, by and large, already ample evidence of this.
If Minnesota and North Dakota sell out in Las Vegas or even get close to doing so, it will largely be borne on the backs of those teams fans that travel there as well as some augmentation by local alumni. (Side note. If UNLV goes Hockey D-1, as has been reported, does this game, then, even get played?). That just makes the entire exercise an unneeded and unnecessary expense for the fans of these two teams. For what, just to go to Vegas? (full confession--I get to Vegas at least every other year as it--for business--for a week at a time). Is this really some beneficial novelty for the teams involved, their fans or, the citizens of the Vegas Valley?
And, not a person has yet to explain to me the benefit to the schools involved in or the rationale for the "Friendship Four" which, IMHO, was a complete waste of time and resources for the schools that took part, and, benefited college hockey in the US exactly how? It would be a stretch to play such a tourney somewhere that might actually even be a source of potential college recruits in Europe, much less, in Ireland, and that wasn't even a stated purpose of the trip.
NCAA D-1 Hockey needs to work on drawing better where it already exists and plays. There are exactly 9 rinks in the NCAA that even seat so much as 7,000 people. If there was this big demand, there'd be a lot more new rinks and lot more larger ones.
Restaurant chains don't ordinarily go on building sprees or indiscriminately look at new markets when they are having a hard time selling food in the restaurants that are already open and operating.
