1/27/2023 – Michigan 7, Penn State 3 – 16-9-1, 5-6 Big Ten
1/28/2023 – Michigan 5, Penn State 4 – 16-9-1, 6-6 Big Ten

Once, during my long tenure in the student section, I had a mad, fleeting thought. I was pretty sure I was standing next to Cam Fowler, then a 17-year-old kid committed to Notre Dame, later a top-15 NHL draft pick and long-term NHL defenseman. Fowler would never make it to South Bend, instead defecting to the OHL, but at the time he was rooting for his team, with his phone out, chortling in a way that drove me insane.

Michigan had a goal disallowed. Later in the game a Notre Dame player scored on the clearest kicking motion I have ever seen; the replay review was inconclusive, apparently because the kick had come from far enough out that the overhead camera did not catch it. Yost roared in outrage, and Fowler chortled and typed out something on his phone. The urge to grab Fowler's phone and hurl it onto the ice rose up unbidden inside of me. The higher portions of the mind immediately dismissed such a course of action, but the combination of Yost Ice Arena and a clear injustice had the rink poised on the precipice of madness.

This was a fairly common occurrence throughout the 90s.

Things changed. Dave Brandon's renovations took out more seats and mate them shiny metal instead of Yost's old black menace. The students were almost entirely removed from the glass. The section shrunk. Smartphones came in; fewer students were antisocial weirdos; piped-in music frequently drowned out episodes when the shadow of old Yost threatened to come back in. Yost is still a great venue for hockey, but it is not Old Yost. The malevolence is largely gone.

But, hey, if you take away a goal to make it 2-1 with a bullshit review that disallows a goal and gives Michigan a five-minute major penalty on an incident that occurred almost a minute before the actual goal, well, turns out the old dog can still get up and bark.

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Back in the day, Yost had a reputation. It still has a reputation, yes. But the reason we have this insane tournament system today is directly traceable to the years Yost hosted back-to-back regionals in which they beat one-seeds to reach the Frozen Four. This happens all the time, yes. But those two regionals felt like the building picking up the team and morphing the team into avenging gods, the kinds of gods with eyepatches and scars and deep interpersonal loathings that can only be settled at the end of the world.

This is not a rational thought. Home ice in hockey is not really a determining factor. But that feeling was so widespread that the powers that be in college hockey opted for antiseptic, empty neutral site regionals in the worst tournament in sports instead of give Yost another crack ever again. Madness of a different sort. At this distant remove it feels silly.

Do not tell the powers that be this, but two days after Michigan 5, Penn State 4 it does not feel silly. Here is what happened: Penn State scored two goals in the first 90 seconds and put up 20 shots in the first period. Michigan managed to scratch and claw back into the game, somewhat. With about 10 minutes left in the second period, they score a power-play goal. PSU asks for a review, Edwards gets called for a major for contact to the head as a PSU player suddenly spins around with his head at chest height, and they wipe a goal off the board despite the puck not only leaving the offensive zone but going all the way down to the opposite boards.

This may in fact be the way college hockey wants to officiate itself but what it is not is anything resembling justice. Michigan eats a goal on the five-minute power play, and then Adam Fantilli and Luke Hughes get very very angry, as angry as Yost appears to be.

For a period and a half they enact Ragnarok on a team with a 3-0 lead. Hughes torments Penn State defenders en route to four goals and—probably more impressively—11 shots. PSU, the kings of shooting from anywhere and everywhere, end up with fewer shots in the second and third periods than they had in the first. Despite being shorthanded, and getting more short handed in the third period when Seamus Casey leaves the ice, they run over Penn State. Dylan Duke gets a partial breakaway goal to tie it, and in the stands I am more or less content to take a win and a tie from the series.

[Bill Rapai]

Luke Hughes is not, and fires a top-shelf wrister to go up 5-4 with ten minutes left. All of this madness took under a period of hockey. By the time it's time for Penn State to pull their goalie, Michigan bottles up the Nittany Lions for a minute and a half; they only get an extra attacker on with 30 seconds left in the game.

[Rapai]

Sit, exhale, and oh yes. That's what it was like. That's what it used to be. Wings of fury. Get me a cigarette. I don't even smoke.

[After THE JUMP: broken officiating, pairwise, adversity checklist]

BULLETS

On the state of college hockey officiating. I am not surprised because college hockey is the worst-run sport in the history of sports but they have fundamentally broken a contact sport. This weekend Nolan Moyle got called for a two minute minor for "indirect contact to the head" for missing a check on a PSU player. That PSU player threw his head back dramatically; the officials went into the box and came back with the same two minutes. It is insane.

Many comparisons have been made to college football's targeting call, but this is several levels above in terms of madness. (And targeting is pretty well figured out at this point, IMO. I have not made a targeting roulette joke in some time, and incidents like the end of the Fiesta Bowl stand out as outliers.) The booth can overturn a targeting call; review in college hockey can only increase the punishment. College football has specific allowances for defenders on the calls. If a hit is against an active runner there is considerable leeway for the defender as long as he does not use the crown of his helmet. If the hit is glancing targeting will not be called. College hockey has absolutely no leeway for players attempting to check opponents who fall at the last second (a Van Whye ejection last year) or take glancing contact (an Estapa ejection this year). A targeting call affects the play it is called on and only that play; hockey can apparently reach back almost a minute and rewrite the timeline of a game. The puck went all the way down behind the Michigan net after the Edwards hit; it had literally nothing to do with the goal.

Unlike college football, there has been no movement towards a sane application of the rule. I have very little hope this will get better in the future.

On the Pairwise. On the one hand, Michigan is trundling along in a difficult season in which they look like a mediocre team pretty frequently and will be lucky to make the tournament. On the other:

They would be a one-seed if the season ended today. By the skin of their teeth, yeah, but one thing they are not is on the bubble. Notre Dame is 14th in Pairwise and is almost 0.04 points back, which is a huge gap that it would take a total, close-to-0-fer collapse to make up. This is possible because the Big Ten is finally the sack of murder programs it was supposed to be at its inception. Five of the seven teams in the league are in position to get in and Michigan State has a punchers chance at #18. The aforementioned Notre Dame is in the likely last at-large spot at 13-12-1. Only Wisconsin is definitively out of the at-large conversation.

In addition to that, Michigan played #3 BU, #9 Harvard, and #10 Western Michigan in the noncon portion of the schedule. KRACH has their schedule the most difficult in the nation. You can the schedule eases up from here… because Michigan has Wisconsin, two NCAA bubble teams, and solidly-in OSU to finish the season.

On adversity. Michigan's gotten to this spot despite:

• having Naurato hastily installed as head coach on the eve of the season due to Warde Manuel's dithering
• missing half the team and playing with a skeleton crew in the pivotal home Minnesota series
• losing Steve Holtz more or less for the season at that point
• dealing with the emotional fallout of Holtz going to the ICU with RSV
• losing Portillo for the first PSU series, probably because of RSV, and the possibility that PSU series was affected by illness
• not having Fantilli for the MSU series because he was going to the WJC
• losing the goalie coach for unexplained reasons
• losing Samoskevich and Truscott for this PSU series
• not having the #13 pick in the most recent NHL draft at all
• playing the toughest schedule in college hockey, and
• getting ridiculously boned by the officiating night-in and night-out.

This season has been a grind, to say the least.

On Naurato. Dave and I had a discussion on the podcast about Naurato's interim tag and whether you should remove it posthaste; Alex argues that you don't need to make a decision until the end of the season. I agree that you don't have to jump the gun here but if there's a clear bar Naurato needs to clear there's no sense in waiting once he's cleared it. I'd guess that making the tournament is that bar, especially given the piles of adversity (see above) this team will have overcome if they do. Since missing the tournament is still distantly possible I guess you could keep the interim tag on, but a couple more regular season wins and they should be a lock. At that point making the decision earlier would signal to recruits that it's full speed ahead.