How the Big Ten Broke College Hockey
- Fred
- Apr 6
- 5 min read
If you went to ESPN at 4 PM on March 29th, this is what sports they were covering, in order:
Women's College Basketball - You can follow your bracket at ESPN!
Men's College Basketball - You can follow your bracket at ESPN!
Major League Baseball - Yankee's Home Run Derby in Spring Training! (Play Fantasy Baseball).
NHL Playoff Hockey
PGA Tour
NBA Scoreboard
Global Soccer Scoreboard
Special Report on Sports Betting
UFC Fight Night
College Hockey - On right now at ESPN+
For a sport that is actually on an ESPN platform, the worldwide leader is doing a piss-poor job of promoting their own product. When is the Final Four in Hockey? ESPN doesn't have to tell you.
Now this is the part where I usually blame the corporate screwheads at ESPN, but not today. Today, I blame the greedy bastards at the Big Ten Network.
A generation ago, there was no Big 10 in hockey. The Big 10 existed in almost all other sports, but Big 10 schools that had Division I hockey programs were spread out across multiple hockey-specific conferences. College hockey is really popular today in regional patches, from Philadelphia to Maine in the East, then in the Minnesota/Wisconsin/Michigan region, and also in Colorado.
My favorite college hockey team from my youth, Kent State, doesn't even exist anymore, they were liquidated by an overzealous college president in a cost-cutting move. I was at their last game in the CCHA in 1994.
Editor's Note: Technically, according to the internet, Kent State President Carol Cartwright suspended the program due to a hazing incident. My argument now, as it was then, was if Kent State Hockey wasn't bleeding money, they would still be around today. But I digress.
Big 10 Hockey began in 2013 and tore apart and forced re-alignment across multiple conferences. Why am I complaining about this now? Because for 10 years, the dominoes have continued to fall and conference changes have occurred every single year. Why? Because of college football, and to a much lesser extent, college basketball.
You argue, so what? That's what's happening in football. Yes, that's my point. What's happening in football shouldn't dictate what happens in hockey. Regional traditions are being broken up, which hurts the sport. There is so much money in football right now, regions are becoming irrelevant. The biggest schools are making their way to the biggest conferences for the biggest paydays.
The Frozen Four is college hockey's national championship and there's 16 slots reserved from a pool of 64 teams. The 6 conference champions get the 6 slots, then the 10 remaining places are at-large bids.
This year, the Big 10 Conference had 7 teams, 5 of them made it to the Final 16, easily the highest percentage of any conference.
The conference is built around the needs of the football teams. The Big 10 in hockey is used to fill out programming on the Big 10 Network time during football's off-season.
You claim that a rising tide carries all boats?
College football is as popular as ever.
College basketball is as popular as ever,
And college hockey is about as popular as it was in 1990.
You argue that there's more hockey teams in Division I than ever? Yeah, because Division II folded and the threshold to be in Division I has been lowered.
You say I'm just a whiner, rambling on and on about nothing? I will listen to that argument.
But if you want college hockey to be as popular as college basketball, here's what you do:
Fire Gary Bettman: I know, I know, that's my solution to everything. But do you know why David Stern was, arguably, the best sports commissioner ever? Because his philosophy was that if you grow the sport of basketball, you grow the NBA. Gary Bettman's philosophy is that you do what's best for the 32 owners in the NHL.
Expand the Frozen Four to 32 Teams: A million people filled out NCAA Women's College Basketball brackets. I am telling you, there are NOT a million Women's College Basketball fans. There's a ton a fans who love filling out brackets for money or bragging rights. Next year, since ESPN is your corporate partner, demand hockey brackets. Well, until you...
Leave ESPN: Instead of being the 10th programming option, go somewhere else where you're a big fish in a little pond. Create a hockey super-conference and sign a contract with a streamer like Tubi. Show all your games throughout the entire season on whatever platform you choose. Make it easy for the casual fan to watch your product from Christmas to Frozen Four Madness. But first you have to....
Create that Super-Conference: You see that map below? 58 of 64 college hockey teams are on that map. Do you really need 3 different conferences in Massachusetts? Minnesota? Connecticut? Create a new conference like Hockey USA. Have 4 Divisions that make geographic sense. (New England, East, Midwest, and West.) Allow teams to opt out and go independent if that's their choice. Alaska and Alaska-Fairbanks? Allow them to rotate divisions to defray travel costs for the league. Sorry to go conspiracy theorist, but I believe that networks like ESPN buy college hockey programming, not to promote it, but to bury the competition. If successful, Big 10 teams will will want to join Hockey USA in the future.
The Frozen Four shouldn't have been the 10th option on their own opening weekend, that shows a fundamental failure in college hockey's structure.
But I haven't explained how the Big 10 damaged college hockey. Simple. There is no college hockey commissioner looking out for what's best for the sport. There is no guiding hand in hockey philosophically to move the sport forward. The NHL's Gary Bettman couldn't name 3 college hockey teams not named Cornell if he tried. The NCAA is now the sluggish lapdog of the 5 Power Conferences in football. (Mostly the Big 10 and the SEC.) If an entity like Hockey USA could negotiate a deal with a streamer, maybe college hockey could become more than just a footnote in the college sports landscape.
Right now, the Big 10 exists at the expense of college hockey. 7 teams making money off of their school's name recognition. The rest of the teams in college hockey need to come up with a plan to grow the sport.
Good luck with that.
Editor's Note: Some of our articles have been picked up by Whatfinger.
Here's that Link:
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