Big Ten hockey skeptics have reason to rethink

Perhaps the Big Ten hockey conference needed the same four-year refinement period as the sport’s rawest professional prospects.

After a brief honeymoon, followed by two seasons wrought with derision and distrust, the better part of its present and future membership is coalescing with competitive maturity.

All but one Big Ten team has a winning record at the six-week mark of the 2016-17 regular season. The same goes for Notre Dame, which is poised to join the sector next season. All of those teams have knocked off at least one nationally ranked non-conference opponent.

That widespread stirring of self-confidence can resist dismissal as an accident with fortified facility. Much like an individual team after a mass personnel overhaul and rebuild, the collective conference is gelling as a unit. It is in a climactic phase of growth after going through an introductory sugar rush, crash and regroup.

Big Ten hockey’s freshman campaign marked the only time it has sent an ambassador to the Frozen Four, let alone the national title game, so far. It was also the last time Ohio State and Wisconsin sustained a winning record. And that 2013-14 ride ended with the league trailing only Hockey East with a .600 win percentage against other circuits.

The proverbial sophomore slide struck in 2014-15, when the marquee sextet combined for the second-worst non-conference success rate. A .466 victory percentage surpassed only Atlantic Hockey’s .217 aggregate.

Last year witnessed a mild improvement to the .500 fence, still a distant third behind three other leagues. The biggest blight within that record was a 1-15-1 performance versus NCHC opponents.

But with the tone-setting tune-up for the conference’s fourth regular-season slate winding down, a new high is within reach. The Big Ten enters this weekend — the second-to-last before conference play commences — with the nation’s second-best collective interleague record.

At 32-17-8 versus everyone else, it amounts to a .632 winning percentage, a mere three ticks behind the Cyclopean NCHC. The only league to have logged more games, Hockey East, is third on that leaderboard at .575.

The data is anything but hollow. Minus the misfits of Michigan State, for every tenant or soon-to-be tenant, Big Ten hockey has snagged a big-game specimen this fall.

Michigan is coming off a home split with Boston University, which maintained its No. 4 slot in this week’s USA Today/USA Hockey Magazine poll. The week prior, Minnesota mustered a 1-0-1 record versus the defending national champion and No. 8-ranked North Dakota Fighting Hawks.

Denver has topped both of the major national rankings, but not before its opening-night setback at home versus Ohio State. The Buckeyes have built on that 3-2 statement to sculpt a 6-1-4 start. Coming off back-to-back losing seasons, they are already assured a .500 non-conference regular-season record, at worst.

Those Pioneers that they woke up have supplanted NCHC rival Minnesota-Duluth for the regal poll position this week. The soon-to-be seventh Big Ten tenant from Notre Dame happened to inflict UMD’s first of only two losses so far as part of a mid-October road split at AMSOIL Arena.

Now sitting among the Gophers, Hawks, Eagles, Bulldogs and Pioneers in the top 10, the Irish have had their worst weekend, results-wise, versus Penn State. The Nittany Lions used a bite-size bonus round to finish a 3-3 draw and 3-2 win Oct. 21 and 22, respectively.

While the rest of their schedule has seen them gorge largely on cupcakes, the Notre Dame set should raise their burgeoning program’s ceiling. Even Wisconsin is dishing early glimpses of its restoration aspirations under first-year bench boss Tony Granato. In their 5-3-0 start, the Badgers have split a pair of sets with Northern Michigan, swept the North Country and split the now-No. 3 Boston College Eagles.

With that, one future and five current Big Ten hockey programs each have at least one win over a top-10 interleague adversary on their respective 2016-17 transcripts. Two have done enough to sustain their own position in that club as the season’s landscape takes shape.

PSU is presently No. 10 in the eyes of USCHO’s panel, and No. 11 on the USA Today/USA Hockey Magazine chart. For both the Badgers and Buckeyes, the incentive to improve is already translating. If they each keep their course, they will be entitled to a psychological springboard that puts the Gophers and Wolverines on notice in the pennant chase.

Between that, Penn State’s desire to shore up its top-three status from last spring and Notre Dame’s promise to crash onto the scene, only the Spartans are leaving their followers hanging. But they are sure to pursue changes if they stagnate much longer.

The imminent arrival of the Irish will double MSU’s urge to keep up with its traditional rivals, the others being the Wolverines. As their immediate future appears, the Spartans could be spoilers. If the rest of the conference’s collateral holds up in the national column, they figure to fly solo in that department this winter.

Regardless, it should make for a more qualitative and quantitative Big Ten presence in the PairWise discussion. And there is no cure more viable or more visible for the ailing attendance that has marred the first three conference postseason tournaments.

There are more tests to come between now and March. The Gophers will be the favorites in a home-and-home versus Minnesota State this coming weekend. The Badgers will try to match the Buckeyes when they visit a more battle-tested version of the Pioneers post-Thanksgiving. Minnesota visits BC the day after.

But the bulk of Big Ten hockey is recompensing after letting the novelty of its sport waving a household college conference flag unceremoniously evaporate. Fans are seeing a maximum representation of what each program can achieve in 2016-17. They are getting ample cause to consider what the others will do to thaw out and how the new guys will stoke the flame next fall.

And then there is the as-yet-unclear potential for Penn State or Notre Dame emulators, who could vocally surface if this trend steadies.

Reinstate the CCHA? Reassemble the old WCHA?

Maybe not.