The Frozen Four starts on Thursday, not tomorrow. At least it better, because I haven't even left San Antonio yet for a brief stop home en route to St. Paul!
Is an inferior sport to hockey!
Plinko!
.....oops
Yikes. Hat trick.
I actually thought basketball was our better shot before last night and I think it even more after last night. We could've won that game.
Hockey definitely has a plinko effect to it that could see us winning it, but I'm not feeling great about having to play ND and then probably OSU. Really tough road.
You think even after last night's game that we had a better shot against Nova in basketball than we do in hockey?
I guess I could see the argument that that we were already in the final in basketball, while hockey has two games to win. But on a game-by-game basis, hockey has much more potential for randomness. In the basketball final, the team coming in with the larger scoring margin in the first five tournament games has gone on to win something like 15 years in a row.
Even in the loss last night, I could see a way for us to win. Hit a few more 3's and have Nova clank a few more and you can picture us winning that game pretty easily.
Hockey is probably the 4th best team of 4 in the frozen four and gets #1 Notre Dame and then probably an OSU team we're 0-5 against. I thought our D gave us a much better shot at beating Loyola and Nova straight up than hoping the hockey team pulls it off
Villanova was not only - by a huge margin - the best offensive team in the country. In the Kenpom era (2002-present), they were the second-best offensive team in history. And yet, DiVincenzo aside, they really didn't play their best yesterday. Brunson, the National POY, had a season-low in points and only two assists. They were 10-27 from three overall, by no means a strong outing by their standards. We basically got their B game and still lost by 17.
We needed to shoot much better to be in this game, and even then, I don't know if we'd have actually won. We never really had a go-to guy in the clutch, and couldn't shoot free throws. Even in a coinflip game it would have been tough to actually pull it out.
In hockey it's simpler. Have your goalie get hot. The other team can outshoot you 40-15 and it doesn't matter if your goalie stands on his head.
And/or you get a few weird Plinko bounces and a cheap goal or two you might not otherwise get. Single-elimination playoff hockey is both the best, and the absolute worst.
I've been burned too many times on the hockey tournament to feel confident about anything.
Hey, maybe this year is different. "Up was down, black was white, good was..."
YES! I'm not a hockey guy but I want some blood. I'll be watching. Want to see Michigan kick someone's ass ! Go get 'em hockey! GO BLUE!!!
frozen four. Beat Notre Dame Thursday! Go Blue!
These after 9pm starts are brutal. Lots of coffee consumption.
Since when did the target audience become the west coast? I'm not complaining, just curious.
They don't want the early game to be an afternoon game on a weekday? The Thursday/Saturday format blows.
The semifinals take a minimum of 6 hours from first puck drop to final buzzer, assuming neither game goes into overtime.
Given that the games are on Thursday, what time slot would you pick for those 6 hours? You pretty much have to go with 5:00 to 11:00 pm local time. Any earlier would lead to a mid-afternoon semifinal that nobody watches, any later would lead to an after-midnight semifinal that nobody watches.
So the games have to be at 5:00 & 8:30 local time. Since the games are in CDT, that means the EDT start times are 6:00 & 9:30.
The obvious solution is moving the finals to Saturday - Monday. But just try to get the people who run college hockey to agree that any change to anything ever is good. ESPN has specifically requested that the NCAA ice hockey committee move the finals to Saturday - Monday, but the committee has taken no action and doesn't seem to have any inclination to do so. Why? Who knows. But that's the way things are in college hockey land.
Tennis!
The Masters!
why not? One-and-done hockey makes it possible and we're hot. Though my baseline assumption remains that Michigan doesn't get to have championships in the Big 3 and we are doomed to be perpetually just short of the prize
Final Four right after the disappointment of last night comes at a Good time...ease the sting/[pain of last night..Keeps Michigan in the collegiate sports national spotlight
To Hell with N D!
I have a better feeling with hockey. Let's go win this one!
Michigan has a wealth of sports success going...we are very blessed
Don't sleep on the softball team just yet. They're not rampant like 2015/16, but we're top-10 nationally in ERA (headlined by a freshman pitcher who's #10 in ERA, despite throwing a lot more innings than basically everyone near her), the hitting's been getting better, and the 2nd & 3rd pitchers are rounding into form. Could be a fair amount more fun stuff in A2 over the next couple months.
as I sat in the dark pondering the Nova loss last night, the pain was compounded by the fact that I was wide awake on a Monday night at 12:30 am. It's gonna be a long week
is on during the late afternoon. Today it was worth the watch.
is actually kind of an underachieving program. I was just thinking about how Michigan in the 'big 3 sports' seems to quite often put out good to very good teams, but never really the *best* team in a given season. It feels like when it comes to the absolute top level of competition, Michigan always is up against it.
In basketball, that's normal and probably even good as the most talented teams year-in, year-out tend to be the ones which worry about FBI investigations. In football, it's what we strive for but can't really achieve..and yet of course it bears mentioning that Michigan football has to deal with various elite competitors which have some significant advantages.
Hockey, however, really should be able to put the best college team on the ice on a regular basis. Not many schools play D1 hockey, among those that do Michigan is probably the best known and most prestigious in the world of collegiate athletics. Michigan is a college hockey 'blueblood'. Denver, North Dakota, Wisconsin, BC, BU, Minnesota..those are all elite hockey programs for sure, but they are not Michigan. Yet they've all won NCs more recently than we have (some of them more than once). It's sad that Michigan is going into this Frozen Four as a decided, long shot underdog rather than a solid favorite. Hopefully under new leadership, Michigan will be able to finally assert itself as the nation's leading hockey program.
College hockey is nothing like basketball or football. The best 18 year old hockey players do not generally go to college for any purpose. It is on the whole not a revenue plus sport. Plus due to what I would call the intrinsic nature of the game (the maddening randomness and cruelty of a deflection, a bad hop, a ping off the post) converting tournament appearances to titles is notoriously difficult.
And even given all that, Michigan has as many Frozen Four appearances as any team, and more titles even though it's been twenty years since the last one.