The thing that troubles me the most is all of the excuse making I hear from the WCHA commissioner Bruce McLeod, to quote the one time beat writer for the Fighting Sioux Virg Foss, “make it work.” If McLeod can’t make it work maybe the member schools of the WCHA should consider another person for the Commissioner's job. IIRC the commissioner’s contract is up for renewal this year and maybe the league needs to go in another direction if McLeod can’t offer stable leadership. Maybe there is someone that can make it work. I don’t think the WCHA wants to be the league that killed 2008-2009 Division one Hockey’s version of Cinderella.
With BSU the sole applicant, it would leave the WCHA an 11-team league which would present scheduling problems. Not in the math, McLeod said, but in producing a fair and equitable balance among the big and smaller schools in the league.
“I have put together an 11-team 28-game schedule for three years out,” he said. “You can put it together. … But there’s no model to it.”
The WCHA already plays an imbalanced schedule because home-and-home games aren’t available to all teams. The 10-team, 28-game imbalanced schedule takes four years to work it out so that all teams play home and away an equal number of times. A 12-team, 28-game schedule takes five years.
“I have yet to figure out a way – I’ve been in NHL offices, every place I can to try to find some model that works with some fairness, some balance to it and I have yet to come up with it,” he said.
The schedule he does have has some teams with two games on the road three years in a row to the same school.
“It’s not fair to the institutions that are in the league right now, that they have no idea what their opponents' schedule is going to look like from year to year,” he said. “It has no recognition of traditional opponents we have in the league.”
Many think that a step backward, McLeod said.
Better than an 11-team league is a 12-team league, he said, and it appears work continues to gain another application.
“Obviously the answer to an 11-team league is a 12-team league,” he said. “We are doing a lot of homework in that area. … There are some interests. I can’t mention them, but there are definitively possibilities for us but we have to come up with the right circumstances, the right way to approach, etc. etc.”
McLeod says he hopes BSU can get an answer this spring, right at the WCHA’s annual meeting. “That may or may not happen, depending on some things that are still in the works regarding some of the things we’re hoping for in a little bit.”
(read the whole story here)
Obviously the Commissioner is seeking professional help in this matter from various sources. What makes you think anyone can make this work if he, his team, and several other organizations can't? If I was the comissioner, I'd call the Beavers and tell them to find another program that wants in along with them. That would be my criteria. It appears that Bemidji may not be very focused on this matter right now. After all, they are in the Frozen Four!
ReplyDeleteI have an idea...dro the laughing stock of the WCHA (Alaska Anchorage) and then replace them with BSU? sounds good to me.
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