Blades of Steel was better.  But I don't remember the music like I do for Ice Hockey.

I feel the (Sega?) NHLPA scene in the move Swingers really captured next era (1990s) of console hockey. 

You'd also have to talk about the effect of lower pro leagues in Hockey.  The AHL/OHL/etc. effectively of flatten the talent pool of available college players, since players who are good enough for the NHL are likely to just be in the NHL.  A flatter talent pool generally benefits smaller or non-marquee programs more than heavyweights.

We see the reverse of that effect in CFB, where the talent has nowhere else to go, and that leads to reduced talent parity across the sport.

While the sport is DI, the vast majority of the schools are anywhere from smaller DI athletic departments (like BU, North Dakota) to DIII schools. The number of schools playing FBS football for example are a small portion of the 62 teams in D1. I count 15, and several of them would be mid-majors

• P5 schools: 6 Big Ten teams, Notre Dame, Arizona State, Boston College, UConn(eh)
• Mid-majors: BGSU, Miami, Western, Army, Air Force
• And 47 schools that are small DI to DIII and hockey is their biggest sport generally. In hockey they might be bigger names, but in DI athletics broadly even the big names are relatively small fish

The number of teams that have Michigan level resources and recruiting cache across the athletic department is probably like 5. I don't think the sport is intentionally trying to replicate upsets, but I do think they're basically trying to hold the line vs big schools where they fear stuff like home site regionals will further tilt the sport toward major schools

Historically, all of the conferences have been viewed as 'power' conferences except for Atlantic Hockey and maybe the ECAC which is view as a half step down in most years. I think schools are especially afraid now that the enormous resources of the Big Ten will lead there to being a dominant conference and allowing things like home site regionals only exacerbates that

I feel like "tilted against prominent schools" is a disingenuous way to phrase it. The question at hand is to what degree should greater resources be permitted to yield better results. It feels to you like the sport is tilted against Michigan because you're used to Michigan's resources giving the school a gigantic advantage over most other schools. The NCAA can't exactly limit Michigan's ability to use their resources to drive insanely good recruiting and facilities, so instead it opts to limit the effect of those things, thus leveling the playing field that way. Essentially, the sport doesn't want anyone to be able to just buy championships.

The reason for that is simple: you're not competing against other giant schools, you're competing against a lot of schools that are DII in every other sport. If Michigan were permitted to leverage the full power of their resources, 75% of the schools would never have a chance at another championship. A possible argument might be that those schools don't have any right to expect championships at their size anyway, and should play against similarly-sized schools. That's fair, but that would result in the vast majority of DI hockey becoming DII, and DI hockey would be reduced to maybe a dozen schools. It could maybe work, but seems like it would have a lot of potential for totally destroying fan and prospect interest in the sport at the collegiate level.

So we're at this point where we have schools like Michigan (~$200 million athletic budget) competing against someone like Lake Superior State (~$4 million athletic budget) because there just aren't enough big schools that sponsor the sport to split the competition level. To make that formula sustainable, you have to limit the impact of money and other resources on the competition level of the sport itself.