I would love to see Bergeron coaching at BUGS because that means he isn’t coaching here.
As an aside, this may mean the scheduling moratorium BUGS has with us might go away.
Back to lurking.
Edit: As I think about this, I think it forces Sayler’s hand with Bergeron. Eigner and Berge both have 1 year left on 5-year contracts. BUGS just whacked their coach who had better performance than ours. BUGS is saying their expectations are higher than what he delivered. What kind of message does Sayler send if he keeps Bergeron now? Our expectations aren’t as high as freakin’ BUGS? Who here would accept that?
PairWise for CCHA teams: 31, 35, 45, 46, 50, 57, 63 out of 64. No thanks.
Bergeron said last week that college hockey needs a regional realignment. The CCHA seems happy with their setup and the NCHC is the envy of college hockey. So he’s the only raising the issue.
Miami just won one out of 24 NCHC games and somehow it’s the league’s fault even though everyone else managed at least 28 points. Only UMD didn’t win 11 or more games, and they recently won back-to-back NCAA titles in this league.
Miami’s pairwise would have fit right in the middle of that league. Being in the middle of the league with our facilities and University in a year or two we should be able to climb to the top. For about 7 or 8 years now in the NCHC we have consistently gotten worse, as predicted by many of us. That was perfectly obvious to me when Rico was fired and I said so. Instead we made a 6 year( I think) commitment to a guy that everybody seemed to agree was the best guy for the job. OK, that was not an unreasonable thing to try. However, it did not work. During that period we just kept getting worse. Get to a situation where having a winning season and being competitive every game is likely and we would have the opportunity to build the program back up and attendance might stop dropping if it was fun to go the games again.
You pushed hard to stay in the NCHC 6 years ago. Isn’t doing the same failed thing year after year a recipe for failure ?
I just don’t think performance was the only reason BG fired eigner. He was placed on administrative leave just earlier this season and had to miss 4 games due to his players stealing/lying/hazing/whatever they were doing. And it was brought up in another thread maybe there’s more they found out about him being complicit that made them fire him.
With bergs I don’t think he’s a danger to our players well being/safety so it’s not as urgent as some of these other firings. He’s no babcock abusing the players or deunna Hendrix dating the players or Rico blowing up and screaming at other coaches or eigner or whatever. And to my knowledge bergs has run a pretty clean program as far as “scandals” go.
Yes it’s gotta be a hit on the mental side losing all the time but again and again I’ve heard the players like him. Maybe it’s because he’s an enabler for their bad play😂
6 years ago there was no Covid shut down,no Portal,No exponential
MONEY flowing into college sports ( Mich State head hockey coach just signed $600-$700K/ yearly extension)
.This is a rough scenario
for the AD’s of the “ mid majors” world.
True but if we were in the CCHA it would be real hard to get bids to the NCAA tournament without winning the CCHA every year. We’d have to schedule BC/BU/Nodak/Denver every year in non conference and sweep them all or something to have a shot at a top 14 spot in pairwise.
Versus the NCHC where there’s 5/8 teams still eyeing a spot. While it would be nice to be at the top of our conference I wouldn’t complain about being in the spot St Cloud/CC/Denver is right now. We wouldn’t need to make it to the top to have lots of succcess
I don’t think leaving is the answer. We might just need a different philosophy to build the program back up. If basketball’s is “we’re the most connected team in the MAC” maybe we make hockey’s “we’re the most dangerous team in the conference” and we start bringing in more goons. In short, goon time is our time to shine.
Goons are counterproductive to winning in college hockey - and basicslly anywhere except the SPHL in America now. Jungle B Juniors leagues used to be full of them.
I dunno, Yellow. To me we are so far from even being remotely competitive in NCHC, framing the discussion on how we get to an NCAA berth seems like quite a stretch, no matter which conference we play in.
First off, despite CCHA having a down year, don’t they typically average two teams a year in the NCAA tournament? So, if we did join that league and begin to become a contender, not sure with a OOC decent schedule we’d have to win the conference every year to make it.
That said, to me a more obtainable and reasonable short term goal would be to find a way to claw our way back to a decent (i.e .500 team), offering fans a lot more wins and fun at the Goggin. (and being a firmly established “doormat” in NCHC must make it a real challenge to get high caliber recruits to come here). I know I am probably irritating Bonk w my now rather repetitive “take” on this, and there is a strong argument that to get the best (recruits) you need to play in the best (conference). But as noted above, I don’t figure we are getting those top recruits w our results of the last 7 years or so.
Then, maybe if we gain some moderate success over 3-4 years we can talk about making the tournament. Sure seems like doing both of these might be tad easier to attain in the CCHA.
The CCHA is adding a 9 th team, Augustana. So, Numerically, a 10th team might make sense.
And AZ state is coming into the NCHC making it an odd number of teams ( more difficult scheduling)?
Hmmm?
Not long ago, I found myself driving a truck that had no rear view mirror. Incidentally, it also said “Mom’s Attic” on the side of the roof, but that’s not the point. It got me reminiscing about that great line in Hoosiers where the dad tells his kid to let go of the past “son, this truck ain’t got no rearview mirror…” Look, we can’t go backwards, so we might as well just find someone who can make us great on the biggest stage. And given we’ve almost won it all, it seems foolish to think we should settle. I don’t know if we can win it all, but I personally feel like we can be better in this league. And since no one’s paying us to give them our spot, we are firmly in it. So, let’s embrace it. This program has so many famous alums it’s not even funny. I would imagine none of them want us to drop divisions and they know more about hockey than I do although I would also imagine they would hate my goon squad idea…
Olaf, you bet your sweet ass they’d be there. Or at least whatever the 2024 version of them is. We gotta get back to being blue collar. We may be the fancy school in the conference but we should be the most blue collar. That’s been missing (well, until this year as we were much tougher overall even though our record stunk). We need an identity.
Again I keep saying this, Colorado College is a top 10 ranked team in the nation and they were below us a couple years ago. If they can do it in the NCHC why can’t we
It was just about a year ago that someone posted on here that the CCHA was averaging around 2 bids per year. According to the pairwise ranking posted on this site, Miami would be in 5th ( right in the middle) of the CCHA this season. That is a comparatively short distance to first or second in that league. We are a mile from getting to a winning league record ( which often gets you in the tournament in the NCHC) We are like 20 points below the next worst team.
I think when we played Ferris State the first weekend this year and we played two interesting games I said it was a shame that we were not in the CCHA because we would be seeing games like that all season. Instead we got one conference win all season.,ONE!
This is the first time in over 30 years that I never went to a game. I used to have a dozen friends that loved going to the games. I did not miss it and none of the others expressed any interest. I now have just two friends who still have season tickets and they have been discussing dropping their tickets and just buying them when they want to go as they will be easily available.
I wonder what you and Bonk see that makes you think we will start winning again in this league and make the tournament.
Last year we even had some of our best players leaving through the transfer portal. Nobody enjoys getting beat all the time and finishing last every year. Staying in this league we are likely to continue to lose some of our best players every season. That is probably the reason we fell even furthur behind everybody else in the league.
I don’t see you or Bonk pointing out reasons why we should think we are climbing out of this hole. I am suggesting a way that I think would work, at least making the games more fun and bringing back greater fan interest, which in turn could make players want to play here again.
I mean I don’t think anyone’s saying our record wouldn’t improve in the CCHA and our fans/players wouldn’t be happier there at least temporarily. It would benefit us if we were in a relegation league where we could be sent down, spend a couple seasons rebuilding and getting better then come back up to compete with the best when the time is right. But no chance if we go to a worse league is the NCHC letting us back in. It took them years of ASU begging to let them in. And while the immediate success would be enough to satisfy some people and keep them happy in the long term, a lot of us want to see Miami competing with the best of the best. We want to be in the conversation with all the best teams and not be blown off because we’re in a bad league. Plus we’d get better recruits etc.
TLDR; if we moved to the CCHA, yes we’d get good faster but after we get good there’s no more room for us to climb. We’d be stuck there.