Re: Wisconsin Hockey XXXIV: A Season without Chuck
Not trying to troll here this is a serious question. Do Wisco fans miss the WCHA? And do you like being in the Big10?
It depends on the fan. I'm aware that there are a lot of fans who will tell you everyone hates the Big Ten, despite plenty of fans who feel otherwise. I like the Big Ten conference, and we're still in the first recruiting cycle, so there's a long way to go when it comes to making strong judgements. Most of the terrible things surrounding UW men's hockey right now are independent of conference affiliation. (2013-14 was an awesome season, and attendance started plummeting before realignment.
The positives outweigh the negatives for me. I'm also not from Wisconsin/Minnesota. I respect the history of the league, but I was still in the beginning stages of learning about and following college hockey when Bemidji State and Nebraska-Omaha joined the WCHA. I didn't spend years and years watching WCHA hockey. I learned and loved the history and traditions, but it's just as easy for me to learn the new traditions in the Big Ten.
The WCHA grew to 12 teams, and scheduling got more unbalanced and bloated. The Big Ten allows for more flexibility in out-of-conference games due to a shorter schedule...that involves everyone playing everyone
four times. Teams can learn to hate each other pretty quickly in that environment.
People yearned for Denver, North Dakota...and usually those were the only two WCHA opponents people mentioned. Neither team played in Madison in 2012-13 anyway, and they have annual agreements for out-of-conference games. In my time at UW, I've only seen 2 home series vs UND, and 1 home series vs Denver. Do people long for those matchups with Minnesota State? I like chanting "purple burgers," I guess. How about Bemidji State? (I might have been the only one who was particularly excited for Nebraska-Omaha matchups...I just find that program to be interesting.)
It really annoyed me when I kept seeing people complain about realignment in ways that implied that the previous alignment was the only correct way, and the new alignment is horrible. Most of those people weren't around to pay attention to the realignment that occurred when the CCHA came to be. They only want to focus on rivals who got split up (but will continue playing anyway), forgetting that other rivals that
were split up got put back together. I'm fine with people disliking the change, but when their arguments are presented to me as absolute fact, despite being incredibly incomplete, it's really annoying. I've seen a ton of that. The Upper Peninsula teams got back together, the Alaska schools were paired up. Oh, and Michigan and Michigan State got reunited with their old WCHA foes, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
People get really [urinated]-off when I talk about how it's great that U of M, MSU, U-MN, and UW got reunited, undoing what the CCHA did when they blew up college hockey by poaching teams away from other conferences...exactly what they complain about regarding the Big Ten and NCHC. (And no, I don't do the "U of M" thing in those discussions, so
that's not what makes them mad.
)
Penn State has a short D-I history, but they set themselves up for success as a first-class program. Ohio State is just kind of
there, but they have a tendency to be underrated when they do well (see their injury-filled 2013-14 season). The other four teams all have strong hockey histories - let's not pretend otherwise. Their football and basketball teams don't negate that.
The WCHA tournament was better than the Big Ten tournament can ever be in the current reality of college hockey. (I won't say "ever" in absolute terms.) The reality of the geographic situations of the two leagues make that so. I do like that the Big Ten isn't keeping it in the same place every single year, though.
. When you have time, check this out....http://wcha.com/pdf/mguide0910/Ybk-113-128.pdf 