Long time lurker on the old test site and now here. I’ve been following this discussion and wanted to chime in. It seems like a lot of people are throwing phrases around like “perennial power.” In my opinion, that’s something of a gross over-exaggeration of our hockey history.
I was at Miami in the late 90’s, and the program was definitely a mixed bag. We made it to the tourney once but also had multiple losing seasons and never won the CCHA season or tournament. I did some research HERE and HERE.
What Miami’s program seems to have been before Rico’s breakout year in 03-04 is a middle of the road program with some high points (2 NCAA invites and 1 CCHA regular season title in its first 25 years) mixed in with a lot of losing seasons (including 8 in a row). Cady was 77-99-8 once he got to the CCHA. Before Rico’s breakout year, the program had 15 losing season against 11 winning seasons (and two of those were the first two indy seasons against who knows what level of competition) with a total overall record of 395-489-63.
So when people talk about us “getting back to where we were,” they’re talking about essentially Rico’s 12 year window when Miami was a nationally relevant, solid top 10 program that competed for national titles more often than not…not the quarter century that came before it. So, is the current state of affairs the program’s regressing to its historical norm after riding a hot young coach for a decade? I wouldn’t go that far, but I’d stop assuming that Miami is a Minnesota or Michigan type blueblood with all these historical advantages built in with which to build back. Instead, the questions that need to be asked are what was special about the program in the mid 00s that allowed it to break away from its past and become nationally relevant and what were the factors in its decline. The obvious answer to the latter is joining the NCHC, but I think it’s deeper than that as to why we couldn’t maintain and build on the success of those dozen years.