The final component of our three part Michigan Hockey season preview has arrived. Yesterday we focused on the defense and goalies and the series began on Wednesday by looking at the forwards. Today's edition will pivot away from the roster a bit and instead focus on the competition. Due to the COVID-19 abbreviated season Michigan will only play B1G foes, as well as the honorary B1G member Arizona State who is playing each member of the conference four times despite being an independent. The results of the ASU games will not count towards conference standings, but I will consider them in this article since Michigan will see the Ice Devils as much as they will any other B1G team. The goal of this final installment is to look at who Michigan will play, how they stack up, and what to expect from this weird and wild 2020-21 season.

The B1G Rebuilds: Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Penn State

One of the few times a Wisconsin goaltender made a save last season [JD Scott]

The bottom of the conference since its inception in 2013 has pretty consistently been one team, the Michigan State Spartans. Their 2007 National Championship is a distant memory at this point, buried by almost a decade of poor coaching and program failure that has placed Spartan hockey in a crater. Danton Cole was hired in 2017 to try and dig them out of the hole that Tom Anastos left the program in and Cole has done a fine job. Each season has been slightly better than the preceding one and MSU returned to respectability last year, actually cracking the top 25 after sweeping Michigan before stalling in the second half. Unfortunately for fans in East Lansing, this will probably be a bit of a reset season after Michigan State loses its two most important players, goalie John Lethemon and center Patrick Khodorenko. There are still significant pieces, Mitchell Lewandowski upfront and Drew DeRidder in net, but it's hard to imagine this being the campaign that MSU makes the jump with the players they lost.

[AFTER THE JUMP: 7 teams better at hockey than Michigan State]

Wisconsin fills the mold of a program that has hit the Make It or Break It stage. Back in 2016 the Badgers hired Tony Granato from the NHL to rejuvenate the program and it went well... for a time. His first season got them on the cusp of the tourney and it helped them secure commitments from some high profile talent down the line. Yet that first season is still the best season Granato has on his resume now in Year Five, finishing with just 14 wins in three straight seasons. Even more alarmingly, his recent teams have been loaded with talent and they've still mostly sucked. Adding superstar prospects like Alex Turcotte, Dylan Holloway, and Cole Caufield last season couldn't snap Wisconsin out of last place in the conference and now Turcotte, as well as stud defenseman K'Andre Miller, depart. The biggest problem for the Badgers is they get scored on more than a Don Brown defense playing Ohio State (sorry about that one). Wisconsin was 3rd worst in the nation last year in team defense, allowing nearly four goals per game. Their defensive fundamentals were lousy and the goalie play was atrocious. This year they have a completely revamped goaltending room and they do return Caufield and Holloway, who should be an electric 1-2 punch offensively. But Granato's going to have to prove he can actually coach and not just recruit, because it's starting to get late early for this sputtering program in Madison.

Out in Hockey Valley Penn St. has cobbled together a quality NCAA program in just under a decade, making the tourney in '17 and '18, before narrowly missing in '19, and they were poised for a high seed last year before COVID struck. Guy Gadowsky has proven to be a good coach whose Run and Gun style of hockey lights up the scoreboard with ease. So why are they here? A massive exodus to graduation has sent the program into a rebuilding year. Last season was the year for Penn State with a ton of seniors across the roster and 2020-21 is thus the rebuilding season. PSU lost their #1, #2, #4, #5, #6, and #7 point-getters from a year ago, in addition to goalie Peyton Jones, who started nearly every game. They do return Alex Limoges but with so many new players being thrust into larger roles, it's fair to expect a bit of a step back from the Lions. They will continue to run their outrageously high scoring and fast paced system, a type of hockey that reeks of the 80s so much you reach for your DVD copy of The Breakfast Club when you flip on a PSU game, but it's shown good results over Gadowsky's tenure. It's just probably not the year where they have the right personnel to make a run.

The upper echelon and Arizona State

[James Coller]

Another program that's done well to build in the right direction is Ohio State. After a lengthy time out of the tournament, Steve Rohlik has returned the Buckeyes to an NCAA Tournament regular, making it three straight years from 2017-2019 and they were almost certain to make it again last year pre-COVID. Unlike in football, OSU is not a marquee program and they know they can't get the talent that Michigan or Minnesota can. They make up for it by dominating on special teams, playing smart hockey, and punishing you physically. Rohlik's teams have run into some testy and rough encounters with Michigan over the past couple seasons and I wouldn't expect that to be much different this year. There will be some new names in Columbus though, as the team loses Tanner Laczynski, who was a standout centerman for them the last three years. They also lose veteran forwards Ronnie Hein (their captain last year) and Carson Meyer, as well as defenders Matt Miller and Wyatt Ege. OSU brings in a really nice recruiting class (albeit with no players drafted from it) which should give them a solid base moving forward, and goalie Tommy Napier will still be in net, in addition to forwards Quinn Preston, Gustaf Westlund, and Tate Singleton. I expect Ohio State to be as competitive and feisty as ever and they should be battling for the tourney picture, though I do think they're a slight notch below the best in the conference.

The other Michigan rival in this section is Notre Dame. The Irish have been a model of excellence under Jeff Jackson (no relation to Zavier Simpson), who is simply one of the best coaches in college hockey history, winning titles at Lake St. in the 90s and having taken ND to back-to-back Frozen Fours in the last five years. Jackson's teams employ a style of play that can best be described as everything you hated from the Dead Puck Era, with great penalty killing, good goaltending, neutral zone trapping, and an overall methodical pace of play that sucks the life out of the hockey game. If you fall down to Notre Dame, it's probably over because they do not blow leads and the most ominous feeling in sports sets in. This systematic style of hockey makes them a team that is a bit impervious to losing players, although they did shed a few big names in the offseason, including longtime goalie Cale Morris, and forwards Cal Burke and Cam Morrison. They do bring in a good crop of freshmen led by draftees Ryder Rolston and Landon Slaggert, and I have such faith in Jackson's system to think they will be right in the thick of things in the B1G hunt.

The biggest competitor I see to Michigan atop the conference is Minnesota. If we're talking about an ideal world where every college hockey program is firing near its peak capacity, the Gophers should be one of college hockey's juggernaut programs. Like Bama in football or Duke in basketball. They haven't been that for awhile but with Bob Motzko now behind the wheel, I think they're starting to head in that direction. Minnesota was on the edge of tourney contention last year with a very young team and now they return almost everyone, and yes ex-Michigan goalie Jack LaFontaine is in that group. The Gophers didn't add many recruits because they didn't need to roster-wise, but even so they picked up a high second round draftee in defenseman Brock Faber and fifth round draftee Mike Koster. Add those dudes to a veteran roster and it's not hard to see why they were picked 1st in the preseason B1G poll. This should be a well-coached, balanced team that is expected to make a strong push for the conference crown.

We are also tossing Arizona State in with this group for the reasons mentioned at the start of the article. I really don't know where to peg ASU in terms of the conference picture because we haven't seen them tussle with many of these B1G foes. But, we do know that the nascent program in Tempe is already a quality organization despite subpar facilities. The Ice Devils made the tourney for the first time in '19 and were going to make it again last season before COVID. Their independent status has meant they've played some eclectic schedules the last couple seasons, with some great teams and some very bad teams on there, so it's hard to get a gauge of their overall quality. The stat sheet is formidable though, with four 30+ point scorers last season and two of those return, Johnny Walker and incredibly, Michigan-transfer James Sanchez, who was an afterthought bottom liner with the Maize and Blue. They also roll over goalie Evan DeBrouwer and their recruiting class was dubbed a program-defining haul by College Hockey News, despite not having any big name players in it. ASU won't be ranked in the B1G standings table, so I won't attempt to peg them in the conference power rankings, but they're a good enough team that every matchup with a conference opponent should be a test for that adversary.

Where Michigan stacks up, Feelingsball, and final season thoughts

[JD Scott]

Predicting any college hockey season is a difficult task. I've certainly had my trials and errors since starting to cover Michigan Hockey three years ago. Add in COVID and then the fact that the Michigan program's top players have mostly all never played an NCAA game and... yeah it's not easy. Still, I will give my attempted prediction for how I see the conference stacking up this season, if only to give the readers some fresh content for #OldTakesExposed in the spring:

1. Michigan

2. Minnesota

3. ND

4. OSU

5. PSU

6. Wisconsin

7. MSU

The bottom two seem locked in to those spots until either program can prove they are capable of something better. The middle three feel decently interchangeble, and then I think it's a Michigan-Minnesota battle at the top. Again, projecting Michigan to win the conference makes me slightly squeamish simply because of how many new pieces there are, but they have so much more talent than every other team in the league that it's hard not to see them towards the top.

What gives me cause for concern is that the only other team in the conference that can hold a candle to Michigan's talent level is the team I ranked 6th. Indeed when David asked me on the HockeyCast the other day what made me most nervous about the season, I said "watching Wisconsin and BU play the last few years". The college hockey programs that collect elite pro talent like trading cards haven't exactly turned that talent into glory very often and instead it has tended to lead to disorganized, sloppy play. That's my biggest concern, but I also trust Mel Pearson, who has proven himself to be an excellent college hockey coach in his decade as the head-man across two schools.

The reason for optimism for Michigan is large. They return the vast majority of what made Michigan good last year (a great defense fueled by a star goalie and fundamentally sound blue liners) and then brought in a colossal amount of talent to fix Michigan's weakness from a year ago (lack of skilled offensive players to make plays and finish chances). If the defense holds firm and Strauss Mann is great again, both reasonable expectations, all you need is just a couple of Johnson, Beniers, Bordeleau, and Brisson to hit their projections and this team could be balanced, deep, and extremely dangerous. Regardless of how the season pans out, I am just thankful to see hockey again at Yost and especially to see this group on the ice. Michigan fans have been hearing about the coming reinforcements from the recruiting trail for years and tomorrow it will finally be here. The cavalry arrives this weekend.