WSJ on College Hockey.

The Wall Street Journal is an awesome newspaper when it comes to stories on business and politics but now they have a really nice article on Why You Should Have Watched Hockey. Wow can well all exhale now? What a weekend and now we will have to wait two weeks while round ball steals the show. Basketball is boring.

NCAA Hockey
If only Jim Valvano had coached college hockey. Then the phrase "survive and advance" -- which the late North Carolina State basketball coach used to describe college basketball's grueling tournament -- would be where it truly belongs.

There is arguably no major event in sports more chaotic than the Division I hockey tournament. By its nature, hockey is more capricious than basketball and football, since one player (the goalie) can have an outsized impact -- for better or worse -- on a single game's outcome.

Baseball is similar, because of the pitcher's influence. But unlike baseball's double-elimination College World Series, the college hockey tournament is a one-and-done event, like basketball.

Result: Three of the four No. 1 seeds in this year's tournament didn't even survive their first games over the weekend. Michigan fell to Air Force, 2-0, due almost entirely to the play of Falcons goaltender Andrew Volkening (Michigan took 43 shots to Air Force's 13); Denver lost to Miami University, 4-2; and Notre Dame was buried by Bemidji State, 5-1.

Denver's loss and even Michigan's actually weren't that shocking -- Air Force, which subsequently was eliminated Saturday by Vermont, came within an eyelash of first-round upsets the previous two years -- but Notre Dame's defeat was the equivalent of Radford dismissing North Carolina by double digits.

Notre Dame, which led the nation in winning percentage and goals-against average, was facing the country's 37th-best team, according to the Ratings Percentage Index ranking system. There are only 58 teams in Division I. But Notre Dame goalie Jordan Pearce got rattled early, giving up the opening goal after a strange bounce off the boards, and the chaos was underway. (Read the whole article here)