hockey offsides is awful

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I wondered when someone would notice. There are a lot of games at night now. So many that it might be smart to…

Fox will have its best game of the day will be at noon every Saturday.

— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) May 13, 2019

…yeah, that. Michigan should feature frequently in that slot, and as a person who likes to get home and see the end of the 3:30 games and then the night games I'm all about that. If your priority is encompassing all the madness of a college football Saturday, noon is the slot for you.

Doing the math. Numbers from the new media rights deal:

Big Ten had nearly $759 million in revenue in FY18, new federal tax return shows. That's up from nearly $513 million last year. It's also $100 million more than amount SEC reported for FY18: https://t.co/Xs4icAPcAG

— Steve Berkowitz (@ByBerkowitz) May 15, 2019

That is 13.7 million per school. Michigan could pay every one of their approximately 700 scholarship athletes 20k a year based on this jump alone. If restricted to the ~100 players on the two main revenue sports that's 140k a year.

Nico Collins under the microscope. Combining Josh Gattis with this guy could be shades of Allen Robinson and Chris Godwin:

Hail Warinner. To go from last year to this is incredible.

Here are the highest-graded returning pass blockers along B1G interior offensive lineman. pic.twitter.com/zKK66BFfsU

— PFF College (@PFF_College) May 9, 2019

Find a tackle and Michigan's set to be a lethal passing attack.

[After THE JUMP: UCLA is incredible]

An irregular series in which I fix all of a sport's problems.

[Patrick Barron]

10. Get rid of the penalty for flipping the puck out when you're in the defensive zone. This is exactly icing and should be treated like icing. The only competition for worst rule in sports is what happens when a football player fumbles and the ball goes out of the endzone.

9. Non-shootout wins are three points. The NHL is the only league in any sport in the world in which some games are worth more than others. This is so very dumb. College hockey uses a model where you get three for actually winning a hockey game, two for winning a shootout, and one for losing it. It is not an offense to God and math.

8. Widen the blue line. The blue line is a lovely demilitarized zone that is both offensive zone and defensive zone, so you can touch it and not be offsides. The puck can touch it and not exit the zone. Both of these things are good. No offsides whistle in the history of hockey has improved the experience of a neutral fan. Widening the blue line reduces these whistles.

7. In fact let's get rid of offsides whistles (almost) entirely. Instead of stopping the game, you can just continue playing hockey. An offsides team can't score. Game continues. Once team ceases being offsides you can go score.

6. And add passive offsides. If you can't tell already, I hate offsides in hockey. It boggles that if one guy is offsides then everybody is. If you're on a rush and one guy is a hair over the line, he and only he is offsides. Let him tag up; let everyone else continue playing. If an offsides player does anything other than try to get onside, I guess you can blow the whistle, you game-stopping ninny. But if offsides guy is headed for the blue line, let him get there.

5. Gradually introduce Olympic ice. Olympic ice is a lot of fun, but currently impractical for buildings not set up with a 100-foot-wide sheet already. The NHL should force new buildings to be Olympic-sized, leading to a transitional period where some rinks are small and some are wide and there are all kinds of home/away effects, kind of like baseball. Also there will be an increasing number of big rinks on which standing a guy up at the blue line is super difficult and skill is more important. College hockey already has a number of Olympic sheets, and the transition is both jarring and fun.

4. Just embiggen the goals already. Goalies won. Whether it's equipment size or improved technique, the fundamental truth about hockey over the last 20 years is that goalies win and we give up and to restore the proper tension of a hockey game we're going to admit they win and tweak the size of the goal.

Most protests about this are luddite or ludicrous. One common protest is that expanding the goal invalidates records going forward. It does not, at least any more than the various equipment advances have done so. Ken Dryden versus any modern NHL goalie is QED here:

Dryden's pads are not only smaller but infested with mice and 10-20 pounds heavier. Also he doesn't know about the butterfly. Goalies win, expand the net by the width of the posts, all CLANG events now are goals, add 2-3 per game, it's a good time.

This is important. The current state of hockey is too close to baseball, which is dumbly random, because the goalies can cover up big differences in team quality.

3. A team doesn't clear the offensive zone until the puck gets over the red line. Michigan actually experimented with this in an exhibition a few years back. It was deeply weird but it rewarded teams who could actually get ahold of the puck in the defensive zone and increased the number of shifts where one team was scrambling around defensively and it felt like the team with the puck absolutely had to score.

2. Force teams to change goalies on the fly once a period. This would be awesome.

1. Teams have the option of putting a guy on the ice without skates. Offsides does not apply to him. Goals he scores count double. The thing that hockey has lacked for far too long is a broomball player. What does the world's best broomball player look like? I don't know. You don't know. We've waited far too long to find out.