College Hockey News is a good resource for college hockey, along with USCHO, and provides good content. It is my first choice when I am checking on the sport. And I appreciate hard-working people who have invested decades into publicizing college hockey, people who work hard and love the sport, and Adam Wodon is one of the leading voices in that category.

So it gives me no pleasure to report that Wodon has produced, on CHN's site, a commentary defending the abominable practice of hosting the NCAA tournament regional games at neutral sites, a piece utterly lacking in both merit and persuasion.

To review, since 2003 the NCAA hockey tournament has consisted of 16 teams, with the first two rounds played at neutral site regionals hosting four teams each, each regional victor advancing to attend the Frozen Four. The Frozen Four is a successful event held at large arenas in front of many thousands of faithful fans; the regionals are disastrous events that struggle to draw 50% capacity, clustered around a small region of the country to the exclusion of half the sport's programs. They are intended to be neutral sites and, following Michigan hosting three regionals and advancing all three times over higher-seeded teams, are theoretically forbidden from being hosted on a team's home rink. However, the desire to encourage attendance nonetheless means that teams that "host" a regional in a nearby location are guaranteed to play at their hosted regional, even as a lower seed. 

There is a groundswell of support for changing the tournament format to have the first two rounds played at the home rinks of the higher-seeded team, a position I have long supported, and one supported by the proprietors of Mgoblog as well.

Wodon writes in this document that the current practice of "neutral" site regionals should be preserved.

Fisking is a harsh process that necessarily implies a level of contempt for the arguments made in the fisked piece. I believe it should rarely be used, a practice reserved only for pieces that have few or no redeeming qualities whatsoever. 

So here goes:

The biggest thing I always come back to, is the reason why few of the coaches from the smaller conferences want to change — the double whammy effect against these teams when it comes to fairness. The effect was somewhat mitigated a few years ago with the creation of home/road weighting in the Pairwise, but it's still an issue. Smaller schools have issues getting non-conference home games, which may hurt their Pairwise potential, then have to also go on the road to play NCAA games.

As I've written for years, if not decades, the Pairwise is great — but it's not a precise enough instrument to decide home ice. It's good enough to choose a 16-team field, because there's no better system. And it's far better than opinions of Committee members. But once you have the 16, neutrality is best because the Pairwise is too flawed on the edges to make definitive statements on who "earned" home ice.

I hear this a lot — "Well, at least with higher seeds hosting games on campus, they will have 'earned it.'" But what does "earn it" really mean in this context? The schedule is too imbalanced. So you're relying upon an imprecise mathmetical system that has flaws.

This is the entire argument in favor of hosting regionals in empty arenas every year: It's fair because it's unfair for lower-seeded schools to play road games.

Wodon touches on this and then adds a bizarre red-herring argument that small schools have a hard time scheduling home games against larger schools in the regular season. It is his apparent position that the NCAA tournament is required to adopt a poor format to account for inequities of the sport at large, something no other sport would ever consider, and he does so while mentioning and then hand-waving the fact that the sport now accounts for such inequities in the way it weights the Pairwise ranking that is used to set the tournament field.

Wodon lauds the Pairwise as a "great" system except when he doesn't like it. This is nonsense, but let's look past this to the central argument of that third paragraph: He argues that its accuracy is insufficient to reward certain teams with an unfair home ice advantage. Never mind that the inviolability of the seed bands is one of the bedrocks of the NCAA tournament selection process.

What happens when you have to send No. 8 to No. 9? That's a huge advantage for an utterly meaningless Pairwise difference. What about No. 7 vs. No. 10? What about when you have a same-conference matchup and have to juggle it around? You think there are complaints now? And then the second round? No. 5 has to go to No. 4? Again, a meaningless difference with a huge edge.

His solution? Maintain a system that frequently rewards lower seeded teams with unfair home-ice advantages.

The NCAA Ice Hockey committee wants neutral sites, but they also want fans, so they maintain a policy that teams may bid to host regionals, and if a hosting team makes the NCAA tournament, they are guaranteed to play at that site. This leads to teams hosting near, but not on, their campuses. Further, non-hosting teams are often placed at nearby regionals to encourage attendance as well; the result is that higher seeded teams frequently play the most important games of the year in arenas filled with opposing fans. In 2019, for example, #4 seeded Providence played in the the Providence regional, and in that regional defeated #1 seed Minnesota State and #3 seed Cornell as a lower seed. 

This injustice is what Wodon wants to preserve in the name of fairness.

These are all the reasons why neutral sites is the NCAA default preference.

I will grant that "fairness" is an argument. But it is manifestly a bad one. And that reason is, by Wodon's own admission, the primary reason why things remain as they are.

However, he does try to make some other arguments, which... don't work. Frankly, they are embarrassing.

It should be obvious that neutral sites for NCAA Tournament games is the best approach. 

It is not, in any way, obvious.

This is why men's and women's basketball does it this way. Obviously, basketball, because of its popularity, can support this. It's rarely hurting for attendance at these events. 

NCAA hockey is not basketball. It is smaller, regionalized, a niche sport. NCAA tournament games draw many neutral fans for a more popular sport and provide twice as many games to watch.  Hosting teams are forbidden from playing in the venue at which they host. The NCAA basketball tournament is a self-perpetuation water-cooler phenomenon that sells itself. Wodon is attempting to prove the quality of the current hockey tournament structure by citing a sport that is in a completely different paradigm.

Few other NCAA sports can support this.

That should be telling. In fact, the only other NCAA sport that can support this is college football, the nation's second-most popular sport, and even in college football they are using home sites for their first round games next year. Baseball and softball, both of which net better attendance and ratings than college hockey, use home sites for regionals and super regionals. So does lacrosse.

NCAA hockey can not, in fact, support this, and the flaccid attendance and enthusiasm for the regionals proves it.

But hockey is in a middle ground — just popular enough to outgrow campus sites, but not quite popular enough to ensure four packed Regionals.

By breezily claiming that college hockey has "outgrown" campus sites, Wodon is assuming facts not in evidence. And the reason they are not in evidence is that they do not exist at all. The previous system involved two six-team regionals, divided East and West, and was at least able to draw more fans through sheer volume. The last time that NCAA tournament games were played at home sites was 1991, when they played best-of-3 series in consecutive weekends before the single-elimination Frozen Four. 33 years ago. 

There is no evidence whatsoever that college hockey has "outgrown" campus sites. In all probability, the simple expansion from four sites to eight sites in the first round will result in a significant increase in attendance. 

Hockey got to the point where it felt it was big enough to try it. There were a lot of things about the old system that were not ideal. For hockey, moving to four neutral site Regionals was a symbol of how far the game HAD grown. It was an achievement — something to be celebrated.

This is where Wodon descends into actual dishonesty. College hockey's "old" system prior to the current four-regional system was a two-regional system. Wodon appears to either have forgotten this, or he slyly wants the reader to think that the "old" system is the home site system now being advocated. 

In fact, the move to four regionals was a product of growth, but only the growth of the number of teams admitted to the tournament. A good move, to be sure, but not the one that Wodon implies.

And in many cases it works.

"Many" is doing a lot of work here.

Each side of this argument can cherry pick instances where one or the other is terrible. But I think many people today don't remember the way it was before. They are pointing to recent examples of poorly-attended Regionals, which are obviously not great.

Wodon is dodging the facts here, suggesting that there is an "equality" in the issue when there is not. And he speaks of "recent" examples of poorly-attended regionals, but poorly-attended regionals have been a fact of the NCAA hockey tournament basically without exception for the entire 20-year history of the format, and unfair seeding advantages for the same period. 

But have you ever seen the attendance at home conference playoff games? In many, many cases, even at arenas that normally sell out, those venues are mostly empty for playoff games. We see this over and over again every year.

This is an exceptionally weak argument. Conference playoff games are simply not the same thing, at all, as NCAA tournament games. The use a best-of-3 format and rarely have truly compelling stakes; a team that is fighting for its season is likely expected to lose later in its conference tournament, and teams with legitimate national title aspirations are neither likely to be challenged nor derailed. 

NCAA tournament games are simply on a different level, and the attendance will reflect this. When the stakes are genuinely high, fans are compelled to participate. 

Who's to say that you'll get universal high attendance at NCAA games on campus? Games are routinely around spring break, and not part of season ticket packages. Of course the usual suspects like North Dakota, Minnesota and Michigan will have no trouble — but what about everyone else? I'm not convinced.

I get that the groundswell is happening — but most people in college hockey now weren't around when it was the other way. They don't remember some of those times.

It's been said to me that the current format isn't working, so why not try the other way? Well, we already did.

Wodon simultaneously argues that he's "not convinced" because it hasn't been tried, and then suggests, with significant dishonesty, that it has been tried. Given his evasive refusal to identify the "old" system (which was a different neutral-site regional system) this appears to be a deliberate attempt to say that the system now being advocated by people like David Carle is what was being used before. He wants the reader to believe that people are trying to go back to an "old" way that didn't work or was outgrown, something that is flatly untrue. "Well, we already did" is a line for which Wodon should be ashamed.

We hear about the "student-athlete experience," and, of course the "experience" is cooler to the eye in a packed building. But whose experience are we talking about? What about the experience of the player who likes playing in bigger arenas, on neutral sites, with more fairness? 

We have a false equivalence here. "Bigger arenas" is a laughable term, because bigger arenas are not drawing more fans; when they are bigger (often not the case) the extra "size" invariably consists of empty seats. Not infrequently, the most important games of the year are played in the emptiest and least engaging venues of the entire season.

He also argues for the already-punctured "fairness" principle, but let's park there once again, this time looking at the larger picture a bit. 

College hockey is a regional sport, and it's a little bit funky. The "East" in Hockey is quite far east, and the "West" stretches from Big Ten Country to the Rocky Mountains, with outposts in Arizona and Alaska. 

For most of its existence, the current regional system distributed two regionals to the "East" and two to the "West." The East regionals have overwhelmingly taken place in a handful of cities that exist within a quadrilateral whose corners are: Albany, NY; Bridgeport, CT; Providence, RI; and Manchester, NH. None of these cities, nor regional regular Worcester, are even as distant as four hours from each other. New England-area schools can count on having two regionals within easy driving distance, which makes the frequent failure of these regionals to attract full houses even more startling.

The west, on the other hand, is quite different geographically; even schools relatively "close" to each other are often separated by a couple hours of driving. Regional bids bank entirely on one team making the tournament or are doomed to fail. Where eastern regionals have reliably rotated among several mid-sized venues in close proximity to each other, western venues are much more spread out, and many more have been attempted and failed. 

The result is that in recent years only North Dakota has managed to successfully host a regional in the "west," and the other "western" regional has moved to Allentown, PA. The result is that you get maps of regional locations that look like this:

I'm sorry, but that's embarrassing. Not as embarrassing as the most important games in the sport being broadcast with thousands of empty seats telling the nation how important the games are, but embarrassing nonetheless.

The reality is that the neutral-site regional system does not work for the programs in the Western region of college hockey at all. It's not because of the programs or the fans, which remain strong and vibrant; it is because the system is a failure. It is patently unfair.

Wodon complains about unfairness, but the truth is that he is just fine with unfairness, as long as that unfairness favors his preferred region.

What we should be doing, instead, is making improvements to current format.

Let's make it so that a host school only gets to play at that Regional if it's a 1 or 2 seed.

Let's stop the Committee from giving 4 seeds de facto home games at nearby Regionals just to help attendance, when there are other options. I don't mind making tweaks to help attendance, but not ones that are unfair to other teams.

These changes would ensure fewer fans attend the games, which will not solve the attendance issues, but it makes the argument in the following paragraph really funny:

At the same time, as we really "grow the game" — through marketing, through more schools sponsoring the sport in more diverse geographical areas — through lowering ticket prices! — the ability to support neutral site Regionals that will be well-attended across the board, will become more and more likely.

No, it will not. This is simply a fantasy promulgated by Wodon to attempt to argue for keeping the status quo. Doubling down on failed system, one with 20 years of data, will not magically increase attendance.

College hockey is what it is: It will never be NCAA basketball, and it should not try to be so. It is a regional sport with dedicated but relatively small fanbases. Fanbases that are currently ill-served by the current NCAA tournament system that ensures that the most important games of the season are played in remote locations where few can attend. Schools like Minnesota State, one of those little-guy schools Wodon claims to be advocating for, have had multi-year stretches of excellence in which they have never been able to play NCAA tournament games in front of more than a handful of their fans. 

But, as much as growth as possible, it will not occur by making the most important games of the year, the ones that get actual national television coverage, empty embarrassments that tell the viewers that the games don't matter. Want to make new fans take interest in college hockey? don't show them thousands of empty seats in Albany. Show them Lawson or Mariucci or Agganis or Lynah or Pegula or Yost in a do-or-die game with the fans at full throat. 

Show them what makes this game so great. 

This is the answer. Not going backwards.

This is Wodon's conclusion. And he is simply reheating his argument that this goes "backwards," which only makes sense if the reader follows his hints and connects dots that aren't really there, and believes that hosting single-elimination games at home sites is the format that existed prior to 2003. Which is to say, Wodon is nod-and-winking at an argument that is not in keeping with the facts. 

He should be better than this.

And college hockey should be better than this, too. It's a marvelous sport with outstanding home rink atmospheres. And the players and the fans deserve to enjoy those atmospheres; yes, even the lower-seeded teams that are only lower seeded by a sliver of math, who will still win in upsets and experience the unique joy of silencing a hostile crowd, the dream of many an athlete. 

Many more pages could be written about the wonder of elimination hockey in home arenas. Many already have. The focus of this piece has been to engage the weakness of Adam Wodon's for the status quo; the fact that many of the best arguments in favor of changing the format are never addressed by him speaks for itself.

Move the NCAA tournament opening rounds to campus sites.