The State of College Hockey

[Bomber36]

The State Of The Game Press Conference (compiled by exileondaytonst on Reddit)

As recorded by Mike McMahon (College Hockey Insider, College Hockey News)

Featuring:

• Jeff Schulman (Athletic Director, Vermont ; Chair of the NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Committee)
• Scott Sandelin (Head Coach, UMD ; Member of the NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Committee)
• Erik Martinson (Deputy AD, North Dakota ; Chair of the D-I Men's & Women's Ice Hockey Rules Committee)
• Steve Metcalf (Hockey East Commissioner ; President of the Hockey Commissioner's Association)

Notable topics:

* Changes to the ban on CHL players & the transfer portal
* Jim Connelly noted the relationship between the CHL issue and the transfer portal, since increasing the player pool might help mitigate the transfer portal issue
* Lots of concern over the added pressure of not just losing players to pro contracts, but also keeping rosters intact because of the portal
* Will, predictably, be a major talking point in Naples
* NIL money
* Schulman noted the oddity of how NIL money for football and basketball wildly outpaces the benefits players get from the CHL, and how that likely should impact the CHL decision
* Potential changes for the rules committee
* Some openness to looking at half-shields, Scott Sandelin naturally spoke about the desire to see something with neck protection (while referencing Adam Johnson)
* Regional Format
* Schulman and Metcalf expressed support for the existing regional format (which... there's debate, but that's fair), while also saying that attendance was very good this year (which... meh, it probably wasn't very good but there were good reasons for it)
* Metcalf claimed a majority of coaches supporting the neutral site format, citing it as an important element for a national tournament
* Certainly no indication that they're going to address the day off in the regional format
* New Programs / Independents / Etc.
* Not much on this topic, but it was noted that the heavy weighting on away games in the RPI/PWR is meant to help get home games scheduled for "low resource" schools

 

[Bomber36]

Speaking specifically about the regionals, this was the attendance This year and attendance over the years. (Again, this info was compiled by exileondaytonst on Reddit) this is as intensive an analysis as you will find anywhere.

2024 Regionals Attendance Postmortem

Well... the numbers weren't great. It's just a question of whether they were horrible or about what you'd expect. Depending on how you look at the numbers, you could reasonably come to either conclusion. But we do know that they weren't great.

If you followed the "Analyzing the NCAA Regionals" series, I've added the data from 2024 to the data set. You can see all the 2024 data appended to the end of the table here (along with every other regional, dating back to the start of the 12-team, 2-regional format). But a basic summary is:

|Host|Teams|Venue Capacity|Average Attendance|

|Providence|BC, MI Tech, Q'Pac, Wisc|11273|6604|
|Sioux Falls|BU, RIT, Minn, UNO|10678|5832|
|Springfield|DU, UMass, Cornell, Maine|6800|4689|
|Maryland Heights|MSU, NoDak, Mich, WMU|2500|3148|

There are also some key metrics to make note of in that table (most notably: the regular season home attendance of the regional participants, how far away the teams were from the regional site, and those two data points in a ratio).

The charts used for a lot of my analysis are updated:

• Total Regional Attendance By Year
• Regional Attendance Broken Down

Before we get to the bad news, some general good news:

* The undersized venue sold out.
* Just like last year, there was one "small venue" (below 6000 capacity) and it was sold out (in fact, the standing room figures had the official attendance averaged about 600 fans over the capacity).
* The Maryland Heights figures are a little suspect, since clearly some Sioux and WMU fans didn't show up to the final, and they reported the same 3148 figure for all three games, but I think it's fair to say that it looked like there were at least 2500 fans there on Sunday, so it's still fair to say it was sold out.
* Generally, things improved over 2023
* Taking Fargo and Maryland Heights out of the equation for the last two years, 2024 is actually an improvement over 2023 (the other three regionals averaged 5708 fans/game compared to 5599 last year)
* Entering the weekend, the average performance for non-"small venues" since 2011 (excluding 2021) had been 5577, so this is a slightly above average performance for regionals in recent years
* Taking into consideration where the teams were allocated (and historical trends on distance and attendance), Sioux Falls and Providence did almost as well as you'd expect them to.
* Looking at the East and West graphs for how attendance relates to the key metrics (distance, regular season attendance, Home Attendance/Distance ratio), we could probably estimate loosely what the attendances would've been at these regionals according to each metric (this is a little inexact, I'm just estimating where the trendlines are for each of the 9 key metrics and roughly averaging them):
* Maryland Heights: 5333
(a little larger than the 2011 St. Louis regional featuring BC, CC, Michigan, and Omaha)
* Sioux Falls: 6300
(still okay, but not as well attended as in 2018 when the site hosted 3 Minnesota teams)
* Providence: 6900
(slightly above average for a Providence regional, fitting with BC and Q'pac there)
* Springfield: 6700
(with a local host and two other good sized eastern participants, we should've expected this to be slightly below an average Worcester regional)
* By these measures, Sioux Falls and Providence were about how you would expect them to perform given the schools that were in the field, although they did underperform slightly. Maryland Heights, clearly, was limited by it's capacity.
* I hadn't looked into this before, but this is the 4th time in the 16-team field era that the regionals were over Easter weekend. The other three times it happened were in 2005, 2013, and 2016.
* 2005 wasn't impacted too terribly by Easter (it outdrew the 2004 regionals), but that was a different era for college hockey attendance in general
* 2013 and 2016, however, were seemingly impacted heavily by the timing, even compared to other seasons of the time. In fact, if we look at the 10 worst attended regionals in the 16-team era, we can see some common risk factors among most of them (5 of the 6 worst ones are either impacted by COVID or Easter):

"Risk Factors: (1) COVID, (2) Easter Weekend, (3) 3 Eastern Regionals, (4) At least 1 sub-6000 capacity venue, (5) The 2019 field featured very few blue bloods, the lowest average home regular season attendance of any 16-team field by a decent margin, (6) The infamous 2013 field with only two teams from MI/OH/IN and had no regional hosts west of Lake Michigan, and (7) The 3-day regional format")

But now, the bad news:


[*]Look at that chart above again. This was the 6th lowest attended set of regionals in the history of the format. We can hem and haw about how those numbers are handicapped by the Centene Center, or the Easter weekend, or anything else, but all in all that's not good.
[*]While UMass and Maine losing in the first round obviously hurt matters (as did the putrid early start times on Thursday), Springfield really should've been closer to a sellout, as demonstrated above.
[/LIST]
* Mullins arena is 27 miles from the MassMutual Center. Until COVID, the only time a team traveled 30 miles or fewer to a regional that sold less than 5500 tickets/game was in 2015, when North Dakota helped sell out the 5000 seat Scheels Arena. Between Springfield this year and Bridgeport last year (Quinnipiac is 30 miles away), it's now happened in two consecutive years.

• And really... although we can give credit to the other hosts for selling out or almost meeting expectations (maybe they do if we are able to factor the holiday weekend into the equation), the fact is that there wasn't a single regional that truly lived up to it's potential. And only one of them was limited by capacity.
• With all of the On-Campus debate going on, this year is pretty unique in terms of who the home teams would've been in an On-Campus model. Taking a look at the top 8 in the Pairwise...

* Boston College, Boston University, Denver, Michigan State, Maine, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Maine. That's 6 of the top 8 average home attendances this season in the top 8 of the Pairwise. Plus #14 (BU) and #16 (Maine).
* Cumulatively, their average home attendances are larger than any other Pairwise top 8 in the history of the 16-team format. And by a fairly decent margin. This year's total is 60665, and the next closest is 2006 at 53876. And 2024 is a very different era for in-person attendance than 2006 was.
* 2 other top 10 home attendance schools made the field (Michigan and Omaha). Cumulatively, this is the 2nd largest cumulative average home attendance (95212) of any 16-team field. Only 2006 had larger home attendance figures in the field (and not by much at 96436)
* Even a hyper-conservative estimate of how many fans would turn out to an On-Campus tournament (82% of the regular season crowds for opening rounds, 98% of regular season crowds for quarterfinals) would've outdrawn this year's regionals by about 20%.

 

[freescooter]

Somebody explain to me why they put regionals where there is no college hockey. St Louis, Cincinnati, Maryland? I still think it would be better to have 2 or 4 fixed sites where teams always play. In college hockey “hotbeds.” Make it an annual event on the local calendar.

 

[Omahabound]

Somebody explain to me why they put regionals where there is no college hockey. St Louis, Cincinnati, Maryland? I still think it would be better to have 2 or 4 fixed sites where teams always play. In college hockey “hotbeds.” Make it an annual event on the local calendar.

To grow the atmosphere and “feel” to tournament hockey, I agree, put em where they’ll be supported until the demand exceeds the hub sites.