On Saturday night in St. Louis, MO the Western Michigan Broncos accomplished something that the college hockey community thought was nearly impossible. At approximately 9 pm Central Standard time the Broncos defeated perennial hockey powerhouse Boston University to win the school's first national championship.
They beat a Boston University team that had 14 NHL draft picks playing for them. It was the first time an athletic team at Western Michigan had won a national championship since the cross country team in 1965.
Coming into the season if someone had told you that a school from Michigan was going to win the national championship you would have guessed Michigan or Michigan State. These are two of the best hockey programs in the country. But why was a small school in Kalamazoo not known for hockey able to accomplish so much more this year?
Michigan Hockey is an Elite Program
Michigan has historically been one of, if not the top program in college hockey. Former coach Red Berenson (who is considered one of the greatest coaches in college hockey history) lead the team to multiple national championships, conference championships, and 23 NCAA tournament appearances. Combine this with the academics and campus lifestyle Michigan can provide that many of the other small schools who are invested in college hockey can't match, and Michigan is a recruiting destination, bringing in a lot of the top talent every year. It also doesn't hurt that the state of Michigan is a hockey hotbed, with many of the nation's top players growing up right in the Wolverine's back yard. Oh, and the national development program (representing the countries best 18 and under hockey players) is only a few minutes down the road in Plymouth Michigan.
Last year, Michigan led all schools with 30 alumni currently playing in the NHL. This beat out Minnesota at 26 and Boston University at 22. It was only four years ago that Michigan had four of the first five picks in the NHL draft, all playing on their roster. They've had four more first-round picks in the three years since then as well. Yet, they've failed to win the NCAA tournament since 1998, and only reached the title game once in that time. So why aren't the Wolverines dominating college hockey?
College Hockey is an Old Man's Game
It feels a little weird to be calling college seniors old, but bear with me for a minute. If you're not familiar with the college hockey landscape, I'll summarize the way it works as briefly as possible. Basically, in Canada in the early 1900s, there became a growing need for a level of development between amateur and professional - somewhere that players could go to and develop physical strength and skill to compete safely at the professional level. The result: junior hockey, a 20-year-old and under level of competition for players to grow and develop that has since become a semi-professional league itself and the main path for most Canadian-born players to break into the NHL or other levels of professional hockey. A few decades later, the U.S., struggling to keep up with player development, adopted this same model and level of play themselves.
Still with me? Okay good. The reason this is important is because this system impacts the timing of many college hockey players reaching the NCAA. While some of the best players might start playing college hockey at 18 years old, many others if not most will wait until they age out of Junior Hockey and begin playing in college as 21 year old freshmen.
With a redshirt year this means that college hockey teams can have 26 year old seniors playing for them. Now why is this important for Michigan?
All that top talent they've been getting the last few decades are typically 18-year-old freshmen who play one, maybe two seasons for the program. That leads to many of Michigan's top players being five or six years younger than the teams they're playing against.
The average age of the Western Michigan team that just won - 22.6 years old. And even this is still a relatively younger team in college hockey. We see this almost every year, with older, more experienced college hockey teams dominating the NCAA tournament. It makes it tough for Michigan, which relies so much on elite 18, 19, and 20-year-olds to compete and make a deep run against bigger, older, and more physical teams.
Many people are familiar with the concept of one and done players in basketball and the balance of recruiting players to stick around and develop vs getting the top talent. In hockey, with more physicality and larger age gaps, the difference between the elite players and the veterans is even more pronounced.
What Can Michigan Do?
It's hard to turn down getting a lot of the top recruits every year. Michigan is always going to be an elite recruiting hockey program. As a result, they're going to be competitive almost every year. The veteran teams that dominate the NCAA tournament on the other hand go through streaks. They have stretches of bad seasons while they develop and grow as a team.
Other things need to be addressed with the program as well - things like NIL (although this hasn't become a big factor in college hockey yet), needed facility upgrades, and the addition of Canadian Major Junior players to now eligible to play in college (If you don't know what that means we'll save it for another day.
Ultimately, it's going to come down to Michigan hockey finding a way to recruit enough older players who will stick around long enough to give the Wolverines a physical edge in some of those later NCAA tournament games. Having elite skilled players is great, but a lot of hockey, especially at the college level, comes down to discipline and physicality - something older teams will always be better at. So can Michigan figure it out and put an end to the 27-year championship drought? The good news is we're only 361 days away from next year's National Championship game in Las Vegas, Nevada, and finding out if Michigan hockey has what it takes.