False Start, Trying Again

OK, so... about that petition...

Last week we brought up the idea of Michigan Tech and RPI playing each other in the near future, and, in league with Tech Hockey Guide, we put together a petition that would be sent to decision-makers at the two schools encouraging such an arrangement to be made.

Apparently, we should have done a little more research about where to host the petition. The site we chose, it turns out, not only sends an email out to the decision-makers every time someone signs the petition (we'd wanted to gather signatures and then deliver them... you know, like a regular petition), they also signed up everyone who signed to receive their emails, which we had been led to believe would not be the case.

Our most heartfelt apologies to everyone (including the decision-makers) who has been needlessly hassled by our poor choice of partnership with this particular site.

However, we do still want to do a petition, and after initial tests at a second site proved to be not much more than a huge joke, we decided that we'd have to do it in house, instead.

If you're interested in signing our petition - this time, 100% free from problems - surf on over to our new location right at Tech Hockey Guide and sign away.

A Look in the Mirror?

I want to tell you about a specific institution of higher learning out there, let's see if you can guess the one I'm talking about just by describing it.

It's a northern school with about 5,300 undergraduates, best known for two things: its engineering programs and hockey. On the former, the school has a number of distinguished alumni known the world over. On the latter, despite not being a "power school" when it comes to the NCAA, the school has won the national championship on more than one occasion (though recent history hasn't been easy). The male to female ratio there is terribly skewed. Winters are brutally cold and filled with snow, but the school does have a popular Winter Carnival.

I know you've already got the answer. It's Michigan Tech, of course.

What, you were thinking of another school? (I know it wasn't Clarkson, at least not after that national championship mention.)

Yes, the illustration on how Michigan Tech and RPI are schools with very similar backgrounds is pretty tough to deny. It even goes a step further - Michigan Tech is in Houghton, MI, named after Douglass Houghton, RPI Class of 1829 (born in Troy and trained by Amos Eaton himself), and one of the residence halls there is named after Houghton.

The schools have played a combined total of 182 hockey seasons. And yet, the Huskies and the Engineers have done battle on only three occasions:

December 29, 1956: The first meeting between the teams came just two seasons removed from RPI's first national championship and concluded an all-around disastrous 6th annual RPI Invitational for the Engineers while providing a big end to a big weekend for the Huskies as MTU picked up a 6-4 victory in Troy. The Engineers finished last in their own tournament for the first time, managing only a Thursday tie with Laval in the round-robin before losing to McGill and then Michigan Tech. The Huskies, meanwhile, became the second consecutive western team (following Minnesota) to win the RPI Tournament, as their win over the hosts preceded a tie with McGill and a 9-6 win over Laval.

December 30, 1967: Once again playing each other on the third night of the round-robin RPI Tournament, it was the Engineers turn to pick up a win (4-3) over Michigan Tech - in a stark coincidence, this game coming two seasons after a Tech national championship, though this was their second. The result left both teams with a 2-1 record in the tournament, as was McMaster, which skated off with the championship thanks in large part to a 10-6 victory over RPI the previous night. MTU had beaten McMaster 5-3 in the tournament's opening game, while all three teams beat up on Yale.

October 15, 2005: On the neutral ice of Sullivan Arena in Anchorage, Alaska for the Nye Frontier Classic, Michigan Tech jumps out to a 3-1 lead helped by Chris Conner's two goals, but the Engineers stage a comeback kickstarted by a Kevin Croxton goal just eight seconds after Conner's second tally, and win it by a 4-3 final with the game winner in the 3rd period on Andrei Uryadov's first career goal on a 5-on-3. The victory was also Mathias Lange's first career win in net.

And... that's all these two schools have to show against each other for 182 years of hockey - all three games, it should be pointed out, taking place during an in-season tournament.

Although there are three relatively storied college hockey programs in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (with 7 national championships between them), RPI has visited the region only once in their entire history - a two-game series with a then-unheralded Lake Superior State team in November 1974 (both wins for the Engineers). You may recall from our Know Your Enemy a few weeks back that RPI has never even faced MTU's U.P. rivals from Northern Michigan, a team that won a national championship some 20 years ago.

So here's what we're saying: why not a two-year engagement with the Huskies from Houghton? It wouldn't be the easiest of road-trips, it's true, but it would be a great opportunity for a pair of very similar schools to get to know each other a little better - some cultural exchange, if you will. A chance for Michigan Tech to see the Red Army from Troy, and a chance for RPI to embrace Mitch's Misfits from the U.P.

We're teaming up with the Tech Hockey Guide to offer... not so much a petition (well, OK, it IS technically a petition...) as much as a show of support for a future RPI-MTU game/series/whatever.

If you'd like to see the Huskies and the Engineers do battle, show your support by signing our petition! Just click this link!

Better yet, sign it, and ask your friends what they think! We'll send our show of support off to decision-makers at both schools when we collect enough names.

Revolving Door

It's one of the items that we touched on in our last posting about a week and a half ago, but even then, we had no idea just how crazy and how fast the coaching carousel would spin... or just how much impact it would have on the ECAC.

Here's the rundown.

Michigan Tech: Still looking for a coach after alum and long-time Michigan assistant Mel Pearson left them at the altar at the very last minute. Much of the most recent talk has been about Nebraska-Omaha associate head coach Mike Hastings, who coached the USHL's Omaha Lancers from 1994 to 2008.

UMass-Lowell: Norm Bazin, the head coach at Division III Hamilton for the last three years, will be the new head coach in Lowell, and the first alum to ever coach the program. Prior to that, he spent eight seasons as an assistant at Colorado College. So the Lowell coach doesn't touch off another search elsewhere, at least not at the Division I level.

Clarkson: If you'd asked me two weeks ago which coach in the ECAC was most likely to lose his job, I'd have told you that it was Harvard's Ted Donato, with the qualifier that he wasn't likely to get the boot. Unfortunately for George Roll, he was the right answer, he lost his job last week without much in the way of an official explanation. We can presume that the three straight losing seasons were more than the alumni, who are used to winning all the time, were willing to tolerate. I'd thought Roll would get at least one more year to turn the team around, especially considering that he brought Clarkson within a goal of playing in the Frozen Four in 2008. A lot of what happened to the team in the last two years was hardly his fault - most notably, a rash of injuries last season and some legal problems for some important recruits.

It's Clarkson's loss, in my view. Roll is a proven winner - it's the ECAC and the college hockey landscape that has changed. It's not going to be easy for Clarkson to be as dominant in the ECAC as they were for decades, but Roll knew what he was doing. The only message this firing sends is to anyone who would have interest in the job. You get very little margin for error.

At any rate, the names that were immediately thrown around are a couple of guys who have been behind the bench in Potsdam before, US Under-18 Team coach Ron Rolston and Cornell associate head coach Casey Jones, but it's worth pointing out that those guys have had their names thrown around for every opening in college hockey since the Clinton administration, including the one at RPI in 2006, regardless of prior links.

And let this be a lesson to the tiny but whiny minority of RPI alums and townies who have been agitating for Seth Appert's head. We've said it about a million times, but it still needs to be said - it's a dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb idea. Uber-dumb.

Providence: Found their man in Union's Nate Leaman. Notably for RPI fans, Ben Barr will follow Leaman from Schenectady to Providence. That begot...

Union: The Dutch wasted no time whatsoever in promoting the associate head coach, Rick Bennett, as soon as the Leaman move became official. Bennett ironically is a Providence alum, who spent five years as an assistant with the Friars before joining Union in 2005 when Paul Pooley was let go. He was promoted to associate head coach in 2007. Hard to say right now what this means for Union but they were clearly comfortable with the idea even before Leaman left, so they must believe he will be able to carry on Leaman's work in Schenectady.

Penn State: All the buzz was on Minnesota-Duluth's Scott Sandelin and Wisconsin women's coach Mark Johnson, but instead, it'll be Guy Gadowsky, the man that brought Princeton hockey back into relevance. Word came out on Easter Sunday that Gadowsky was the choice to become the first varsity hockey coach at Happy Valley, and he was formally introduced today. Therefore...

Princeton: Still too early to tell who might be a candidate for the sudden opening at New Jersey's lone entry in Division I college hockey, and truth be told, the level of fan buzz at Princeton is so generally low that we may not find out much until the process is over unless there's a present coach who ends up in the mix for this one. Eh, why not. How about Ron Rolston or Casey Jones?

Elsewhere: For a short time late last week, there was concern that something was happening at Western Michigan. It was announced that WMU had a press conference ready to go regarding the future of the head coach, which lately has been code for "he's leaving" or "he's getting canned." For Jeff Blashill, however, it was merely a much deserved raise and extension, intriguing especially considering the question marks surrounding WMU and the rest of the CCHA in the light of the pending Big 10 conference, which will likely tear the league asunder.

Also, just to throw this in - interesting story out of Tucson, AZ. Yes, that's right. Leo Golembiewski, who has run a very successful semi-independent club team at the University of Arizona since 1979, may be on his way out. Few people realize that the U of A has a fairly noteworthy club program, known as the IceCats, that draw just as many fans as many ECAC teams do on a regular basis. Golembiewski has been running almost every element of that program for 32 years, but it appears that Arizona is ready to step in and wrest most, if not all, control away. Arizona, to me, has always been an interesting "what if" candidate for Division I expansion given the popularity of the IceCats, so this may bear keeping a semi-interested eye on.