What can everybody else learn from college hockey?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I’m still at the Online News Association Conference today, in wonderful downtown Chicago. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop me a line! I’m speaking at noon, but I’ll be around the convention until the evening.

With me being out and about trying to learn from other serious professional publishers, the time is perfect for another guest post. Today, I’d like to pass the mic to a previous Extra Points contributor, Nathan Strauss. Nathan would like to talk to you today about college hockey, a sport that I tweeted would be better off ditching the NCAA structure entirely. Nathan has better ideas!

Nathan Strauss (@nathanpstrauss) has spent the last four years as the play-by-play broadcaster for UMass Hockey on radio and TV. He is receiving his MS next month from the McCormack School of Sport Management at UMass, where he also attended undergrad. In the daytime, he works in a product success role at Teamworks, calls games across all sports at UMass, and heavily weighs going to law school while he keeps working his way through the world of hockey broadcasting.   

I watch, broadcast, and think about college hockey a lot. It’s an unhealthy addiction that runs from October to April each year. For whatever reason, it scratches an itch: it’s high quality competition, but also the perfect mix of elite prospects, future minor pros, and players whose peak comes in college; it’s simultaneously quaint and regional, but is also the most viable NCAA pathway to the pros. The UMass Hockey season ending and a well-timed post from Matt got me thinking:

Why does men’s college hockey operate so differently from the rest of the NCAA––and could its semi-professional structure be the model for other college sports?

If you aren’t familiar with men’s college hockey, the landscape might surprise you. Amongst its 63 teams are 18 from otherwise non-D1 institutions; just four of the last 15 championships have been won by schools with FBS football––two for BC, and one each for UMass and Western Michigan. In case you think that 63 teams sounds small, you’re right: it’s smaller than men’s lacrosse, for example. 

The small number of participating schools leads to a bevy of sport-specific conferences; of the six men’s conferences, only the Big 10 is an all-sports body, with the rest––Hockey East, CCHA, NCHC, AHA, ECAC––hockey only.  

What this means, though, is that the relative quality of the sport is really high. Men’s college hockey players are the most likely to play at the highest professional level (IE, NHL) of any team sport; the last NCAA study in 2023 showed that 7.1% of college players will make the NHL, four times greater than basketball or football (and a number that has increased since then). 75% of teams had at least one alum on an NHL opening-night roster this year, and 42% of debuts in the NHL last year were NCAA alums. 

We all know that NCAA commercial that (rightly) warns that most of us will go pro in something other than sports, but D1 men’s hockey contravenes that message. Just over half of all players from the last 4 seasons have signed some level of professional contract across the three North American professional leagues and Europe. If you slip off the shackles of amateurism, this makes college hockey perhaps the most viable professional sporting pathway in the NCAA. 

There is a delightful egalitarianism within the sport, too; the NCAA tournament field is determined by automatic qualifiers and pure math, removing subjectivity completely. Finances and resources aren’t evenly distributed, but five of the six conferences have been represented in a championship game in the last five years. 

From a representative standpoint, every conference is directly represented with no weighted voting, even with an autonomy conference in the mix. This new committee came a year after the commissioners of the six conferences made a formal request in 2024, despite being rebuffed initially. 

Previously, most major and minor legislative changes emerged from the annual coaching conference in Naples, which also features the NHL and College Hockey Inc for discussions on alignment, but would still have to pass muster at the highest levels of NCAA bureaucracy. They encountered standard procedural delays, but the biggest complaint was that people with no hockey background were left to rule on hockey-specific issues––and as you’ll see, there are some pretty big differences endemic to hockey.

College hockey has always operated differently in large part due to the global hockey ecosystem, which is tethered to the NHL. Players are NHL Draft eligible from their age-18 to age-20 birth years. Most importantly, drafted collegiate players have their rights held by the drafting team until the conclusion of their senior year. (In baseball––the only other sport with high-school aged draftees––if a high school player gets drafted and goes unsigned, the drafting team does not retain any rights to the player.)