Two in the Box

Tyler Roeder contributed to this post.

The tumult of realignment has turned college football inside out in recent seasons and is the most talked about subject in the sport this side of NIL.

As this summer’s round of conference poaching wrapped up, the idea of what this sort of practice might look like in NCAA hockey sprang to mind. Conference realignment isn’t foreign to college hockey either, as the formation of the B1G Conference created a domino effect when plans for the conference were first announced in 2011. The ripple effect of the B1G creation is still being felt after the CCHA’s recent reformation and the subsequent folding of the WCHA. Unlike the TV-money fueled change in football, much of the reshuffling in hockey has been driven by the need for a more manageable geographic region of conference play. Even still, several programs have had to shut down over the last five years due to budgetary constraints, something not felt by revenue sports like football. Interestingly, that hasn’t prevented schools from adding DI hockey programs. In fact, despite the struggles faced by the likes of Alabama-Huntsville, Alaska-Anchorage and Robert Morris, there continue to be reports of schools conducting studies to add the sport to their offerings. 

With that in mind and in addition to the recent college football realignment in mind, we put our heads together to come up with ideas for not only conference realignment, but further expansion of college hockey’s footprint. What follows is a combination of the ideas floated on the most recent episode of The Instigator Podcast. It is a blue sky concept for reshaping or creating various conferences, adding schools which we feel would be strong supporters of hockey and creating an ecosystem where every program can thrive in their own right. 

One of the easier conferences to tackle was Atlantic Hockey. It’s already a fairly conveniently structured conference from a geographic perspective and a couple minor tweaks could help that further. For one, adding Long Island University from the ranks of the Independents not only gives the conference another member, but plugs LIU in with a group of schools which will not tax them much on travel. We also opted to add Navy, a service academy with a positive track record at the ACHA level – something we factored into our decisions on expansion candidates. The addition of Navy puts another service academy on the ice and would help cover for moving Air Force to a western-based conference where their travel would be more palatable. 

There would be a benefit to keeping the service academies in the same conference, but Air Force has always felt a little out of place in Atlantic Hockey. Even without all three playing in the same conference, a Beanpot-style tournament where the trio competes against each other each season would be a terrific addition to the college hockey calendar. 

We both felt the area with the greatest opportunity for growth was on the west coast through schools such as USC and UCLA. But it also creates one of the larger questions over how to integrate those teams into the college hockey landscape. Realistically, building a new conference on the west coast would be the most feasible for those schools and their travel budgets. However, the steps that led the B1G Conference to add hockey in the first place, was the introduction of Penn State, which finally gave the conference the requisite number of teams set by the NCAA for conference formation. That led to the defection of the BIG schools in both the WHCA and CCHA, something the conference would certainly continue with any institution tied to them in sports such as football or basketball. 

Given that likelihood, and that we both felt strongly about adding Illinois, Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington, it’s more appropriate to lump them into the current B1G. 

Our train of thought on these additions is two-fold. First and foremost, Illinois has drawn extremely well and competed at the highest level of club hockey for quite some time. They’ve been on the forefront of rumors for years and it seems like a matter of time until an alum steps forward with the money to build a rink and kickstart a program. In fact, there was plenty of chatter on the school adding hockey just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. Their proximity to Chicago and that hockey fanbase is just another reason for the school to be playing at the DI level. They already run their program like a varsity sport, the only thing lacking is the official designation.

Our reasoning for the others is a bit more aspirational than with Illinois, which checks many of the traditional boxes for a hockey program. For schools like USC and UCLA, the brand name carries more cache than their exploits at the ACHA level. Though it should be noted, both schools have club programs which are run well. There is also the NHL connection with the Kings and Ducks that can be exploited. Plus being located in a metro area of over 12 million people shouldn’t be overlooked. 

Similarly, Washington’s location in Seattle, just four miles from Climate Pledge Arena creates a strong foundation for success. With six WHL teams spread between Washington and Oregon, there’s a deep hockey tradition in the area a school like Washington could tap into. Adding Oregon, a team that has garnered attention recently for adding a bit of their football team’s flair to the hockey uniforms, not only gives the Huskies a natural rival, it adds one of college athletics most notable brands and the fourth school being shuffled from the Pac-12 to the B1G. 

Those additions (Illinois, Oregon, USC, UCLA, Washington) would make the B1G a twelve-team hockey conference ripe with collegiate brands casual and die-hard fans are familiar with in major, national markets. The travel wouldn’t be perfect between the four midwest and eastern schools and the four western additions, but for the reasons the football side of the business chased their new additions, we did the same here. 

The CCHA remains largely untouched in this practice. As Tyler noted on the podcast, plugging Lindenwood into this conference helps to further eradicate independents by placing them into a conference where their travel won’t be strained. This would be a conference of fresh faces with Augustana, St. Thomas and Lindenwood being the three most recent schools to add DI hockey programs. 

Hockey East wasn’t altered in any significant way. The conference is well structured geographically and our only suggestion was to plug in Stonehill as they’d fit the geographic footprint perfectly. 

While the CCHA was left largely unchanged, we suggested significant changes to the ECAC by breaking the Ivy League schools off into their own conference and leaving Clarkson, Colgate, Quinnipiac, RPI, St Lawrence and Union in the ECAC as it’s known today. The ECAC would be rounded out by the addition of Buffalo, something that has spurred hours of locker room debates throughout the region. Should Binghamton’s plans to launch hockey in 2024-25 go through, the ECAC would be an ideal landing spot for them as well. The new Ivy League conference would be pushed to seven teams with the addition of Penn bringing college hockey to Philadelphia. 

Our last big change comes in the form of a reformed WCHA or west coast conference. This is where Air Force landed after being pulled out of Atlantic Hockey and they join Alaska-Anchorage, Alaska-Fairbanks and Arizona State (who were poached from the NCHC) as the established programs in this conference. We then added Arizona, Colorado, Colorado State and UNLV to the group to make another eight-team conference. 

There’s really no perfect home for the two Alaska schools as they are extremely far no matter what conference you align them with. That Anchorage has already shut down for a short period makes me wonder if both programs aren’t long for the world. Either way, this format was the one we felt was most fair for both of the Alaska schools and their opponents. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that if the time comes for one, or both of the Alaska schools to shutter their programs for good, that teams we didn’t spend much time discussing, like Utah, would fit well as replacements in this new conference. 

The rest of the conference falls in fairly logically. Colorado’s club program has enjoyed some success at the ACHA level and as a massive, public institution that can draw from Denver, has enough of a foundation to build upon. Colorado State would admittedly be a tougher lift given the market. But the natural rivalry with Colorado, the quality club program they run, along with the proximity to the other schools gives me hope that there could be a successful program built there. UNLV, like Illinois, has been a popular target for rumors in recent years and their club program might as well be a varsity program at this point. They’re a no-brainer for an exercise like this. My desire to see Arizona added isn’t just for the rivalry with Arizona State, but it’s from their prior success at the club level. Past matchups with ASU drew massive crowds to the Tucson Convention Center and I think a varsity program would see similar success in recruiting that ASU has. 

We played with the idea of shuffling schools like Colorado College and Denver into this conference to further bolster the regional footprint (and even potentially leave Colorado State out), but we felt it made the most sense to leave the NCHC as-is given the power dynamic they have. We also debated the merits of additions of Oklahoma or Central Oklahoma, but it doesn’t feel like a great fit geographically. We settled on adding Iowa State, one of the most historically successful club programs and as a school in the USHL pocket of the country, wouldn’t have a difficult time with the travel to the rest of the NCHC. 

There are plenty of schools we could have included in this. So if you’re a fan of Utah, Minot State, Pitt or any number of other schools with a rich hockey history or track record in the ACHA, we didn’t ignore you on purpose. There is a ripe conversation to be had about SEC and other southern schools which didn’t make the cut here. But we had to draw the line somewhere with our little pipe dream. In total, our work yielded 13 new teams and three new conferences. There are no independents and every existing conference was impacted in one way or another. Even college football couldn’t pull off that much movement. 

Realigned conferences. New teams are bold, teams that have been moved from another conference or independent are in italics. 

Atlantic Hockey

AIC
Army
Bentley
Canisius
Holy Cross
Mercyhurst
Niagara
Robert Morris
RIT
Sacred Heart
Long Island
Navy 

B1G

Michigan
Michigan State
Minnesota
Notre Dame
Ohio State
Penn State
Wisconsin
Illinois
USC
UCLA
Washington
Oregon

CCHA

Augustana
Bemidji
Bowling Green
Ferris State
Lake Superior State
Michigan Tech
Minnesota State
Northern Michigan
St. Thomas
Lindenwood

ECAC

Clarkson
Colgate
Quinnipiac
St Lawrence
Union
RPI
Buffalo
Binghamton (pending 24-25 launch)

Ivy

Brown
Cornell
Dartmouth
Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Penn

Hockey East

Boston College
Boston University
Maine
UMass
UMass-Lowell
Merrimack
New Hampshire
Northeastern
Providence
UConn
Vermont
Stonehill

NCHC

Miami
Minnesota-Duluth
North Dakota
Nebraska-Omaha
St. Cloud State
Western Michigan
Colorado College
Denver
Iowa State

New WCHA or West Coast Hockey Conference, pick your poison

Alaska-Anchorage
Alaska-Fairbanks
Air Force
Arizona State
Arizona
Colorado
Colorado State
UNLV