Beanpot Preview

Ah yes, the Beanpot. It's the time of year when it's so cold that it almost seems like a good idea to stay indoors and watch college hockey despite knowing the tremendous odds against any non-BU team. The only pair of games that matter to BU's fans, and the only opportunity for BC fans to really rub it in. The only chance Harvard has at regional exposure.

These are boring, boring times.

Let's start with Harvard vs BC.


Harvard Crimson - 5-11-3 (5-6-3 ECAC, 7th place)

Remember that time Harvard beat Northeastern in the opening round of the Beanpot, and almost beat BU in the final? Not going to happen this year. Harvard opens against Boston College, the only good team in this tournament this year, and is looking to get shellacked in the way that only a bunch of nerds on skates can. The Crimson have fallen victim to untimely combinations of weak goaltending from Ryan Carroll or nonexistent offense. They managed three wins in a row against Yale, Dartmouth, and Union before tying RPI and losing to Princeton. That was the only time this season they strung together wins, and was the only 2+ game non-losing streak they put together. They avoided winning from November 6th through December 28th, notching a win (just their second of the season) over Qunnipiac on the 29th.

This team is bad. Their peripheral stats aren't awful (18% PP, 79% PK), but they aren't great, and they're getting hurt in 1 goal games at 1-5. Their best player is Louis LeBlanc, with 16 points in 16 games, and their goaltending tandem has become a one-horse race with Carroll putting up substantially better numbers than Richter.

Their mascot is also a color.


Boston College Eagles - 12-8-2 (10-6-2 Hockey East, 2nd place)

BC is the only team in the tournament that has bigger fish to fry than the Beanpot this season. They've cooled down from their torrid pace to start the season, but they've got a resurgent John Muse and the power of Jesus. Actually, Muse has been fairly mediocre, but the Eagles know how to score goals. They're got the second best goals for/against ratio behind UMass Lowell, and they've scored more goals than anyone but Maine.

Their best player is Ryan Gibbons, who's posted 28 points in 23 games, but Cam Atkinson is their best scorer, with 16 goals on the season thus far. 9 of the 22 non-goalies on the roster are NHL draft picks, and they're coached by the lovable Jerry York, the perfect foil to Jack Parker's general air of asshole.

Prediction: BC wins 5-2, and it's not that close.

Boston University - 9-11-3 (7-9-2 Hockey East, 6th place)

BU was having a terrible season coming into the holiday break. Jack Paker, in his annual address to the Friends of BU Hockey, called out several of his players, including the goalie Kieran Millan, and literally mentioned "the Red Sox signed John Lackey" as one of the positives of the season. The man knows how to grind my gears. They've picked it up recently though, winning 5 of their last 7, including the most boring college hockey game ever played outdoors (a 3-2 win over BC). They're getting production from Nick Bonino (21 points in 18 games) and a cluster of players with 17-19 points in a similar number of games. Millan has a season save percentage of .881, which is Dan Cloutier territory. Even recently, the games they've been winning have been 6-4, not 2-2.

BU has time to salvage their season courtesy of some games in hand and the general partiy between teams 2-6 in Hockey East. Of course, if they win the Beanpot, which they likely will, the fans on Comm Ave will see the season as a victory overall.


Northeastern Huskies - 11-11-1 (7-10-1 Hockey East, 7th place)

If you ask me the #1 reason why the Huskies are in danger of missing the playoffs, my answer won't be goaltending. Chris Rawlings has been solid, with a SV% of .907 despite a borderline-bad 2.87 GAA. In fact, the team has allowed the third-fewest goals in Hockey East.

The problem is the offense. With the loss of IPNO favorites Ryan Ginand and Joe Vitale, the offense has produced a meager 59 goals this season, second worst in Hockey East, and has gotten obscenely lucky in one goal games, going 6-2. They've gotten mauled at Vermont 9-2* and lost a winnable game versus Lowell in Matthews Arena 6-5 in overtime. You'll notice only the single tie, something rather uncommon for Northeastern, so some points have been lost there as well.

The Huskies, when they do score goals, are doing it by committee. Kyle Kraemer and Wade MacLeod lead the team with 17 points apiece, but 7 players have 5-9 goals each. Interestingly, the Huskies have allowed only a single empty net goal this season, despite pulling the goalie in 13 games.

The last time expectations were this low for a Beanpot title on Huntington Avenue was my freshman year '05-'06 season when the Huskies entered the first Monday night with a single win to their names. They entered the second Monday having doubled their season win total, only to get shut out 5-0 by Harvard. This is Northeastern's enduring legacy in this godforsaken tournament. Winning this tournament would do a couple things: it would make this season something other than a total loss, it would get my aerodynamics class canceled on Tuesday, and it would lead to substantial amounts of Bud Light finding its way to the stomachs of several hockey players by way of my wallet.

*This was a weird game, because Rawlings got pulled for the second period, and then Mountain got pulled for the third, so Rawlings came back to sleep in the bed he made and Mountain subsequently crapped in.

Prediction: BU wins 4-1, the game is closer than the score indicates.

The championship game results in a 3-2 OT victory for the Eagles, and the Northeastern Invitational ends in an embarrassing 4-2 loss for the host team.


Other possibly Beanpot-related miscellany:

• Puck Daddy Beanpot Preview - "And it is the single worst tournament in sports. [...] So what, exactly, is so awful about it? BU wins it half the time."
• Puck Prospectus - Shot Quality - I just think these plots are cool. Lots of neat shit on that site. You'd be surprised at how closely baseball and hockey mirror each other, statistically speaking.
• The Hockey News - Lecavalier a King? Looking likely, but if they get rid of Wayne Simmonds, I'm going to have to punch someone in the stomach.

Northeastern 74, Old Dominion 64

I could talk about the game, but that's not that interesting. So instead, we're going to talk about Joel Hines.
This is Joel Hines. He is the Director of Basketball Operations for Old Dominion. He is in his second season as the DBO, and he was hired because ""He will bring good work ethic, ambition and knowledge of our setting."

All I know about Joel Hines is that he is a class act. When I was yelling at their bench with lame comments about how they were fat and losing by 15 points, some players laughed. Some ignored me. When I called their head coach Ron Jeremy, some players laughed, some ignored me. But not Joel. Joel decided I needed to be taught a lesson. That I needed to be taught the rules of fan-player interaction.

So he told me to "shut the fuck up, bitch." A few times. He pointed and yelled at me when ODU scored to get within 10. I was flattered, frankly, that I was able to help his team to a closer game by providing the motivation they so clearly needed. I advised him that perhaps they should invite me to all their games, so perhaps I could improve their record. He told me to "keep talking, bitch." His players laughed, smiled at me, and I waved back. These players were clearly out of line. They were supporting a rambunctious fan without informing him that he was being rude and/or inappropriate. They weren't defusing the situation. And all those other players, just ignoring me? Well, that's not very proactive, is it?

The world would be a terrible place without people like Joel Hines, people who understand that you should always break the fan/team barrier. People like Ron Artest. People like Glen Davis. These people understand that their interaction with fans is an important part of encouraging responsible fan behavior.

Good on Joel Hines. Even if his language is a bit rough around the edges.

In other news, the Huskies are unbeatable when they make threes, and Paws appropriately awarded Mark the fan of the game bumper sticker for putting up with my yelling and a possible Atest situation with Mr. Hines.

Fire Peter Roby

When Northeastern announced that it would be cutting its football program, I greeted the news with cautious optimism. I knew the harsh realities of college football, particularly at the D-I AA level, and I knew that the program had been playing on borrowed time since the 80's.

With that in mind, I imagined a greater future for Husky athletics. Here were my assumptions:

• The annual $3 million would be recycled back into the athletic program.
• The money would be used to fulfill scholarship debts for all sports, particularly successful sports such as baseball and women's soccer.
  
• The money might not be available immediately, as the players are guaranteed their scholarships, but 20+ seniors, transfers, and equipment savings would allow for a substantial sum to enter use by the end of the Fall '09 semester.
  
• The school would offer transparent, timely, and fair reasoning for funds reallocation in a public forum.

For weeks after the announcement, nothing happened. And every moment that passed reinforced the distinct possibility that the school was royally screwing this up.

They did.

Ed Matz, women's soccer coach, is leaving Northeastern for UMass. It seems strange, because he's brought in two All-Americans, made the NCAA tournament, and made two CAA tournaments, winning one, and winning the regular season CAA title, in the last two years. This is a level of success which has not been attained at Northeastern since the women's ice hockey and field hockey teams were fixtures in the top-10 nationally over ten years ago.

This is the "sustained excellence" Peter Roby, NU's esteemed athletic director, always speaks of.

And yet, Matz is leaving for a program which, by most accounts, lacks the potential of the Northeastern squad. He does not have Veronica Napoli, Devin Petta, or Steph Gordon. It's a move forward in overall stature, but a decided step down in quality. Northeastern would handily beat UMass if the teams played today. All of this makes it very difficult to understand why, exactly, Matz would leave.

Luckily, journalism isn't dead at Northeastern, and WRBB recorded a fantastic interview with Matz. It's about 20 minutes long.

I will preface what I'm about to say by stating that I am not an Ed Matz fan. I spent a substantial amount of time with one of his players, and I believe his player management and perception of player value is severely skewed. I don't think he is an irreplaceable coach, and I don't think he's a Bill Coen or a Greg Cronin.

But Matz won. He won a lot. He won tournament games that Cronin has yet to win. He took teams to a tournament Coen has yet to make. He did this all despite having four fewer scholarships than his opponents. He did this despite having virtually no fan support, a salary most DI coaches would scoff at, and absolutely no support from the athletic department or the NU administration at large.

When you listen to the interview, you realize the sad state of affairs in the administrative office in Cabot Gym. That an organization would reward its best-performing employee by giving him nothing speaks to Roby's severe disconnect with reality. Of all the sports in the school, how do you give women's soccer nothing? Northeastern gets more exposure from an NCAA women's game than it does from a season of ice hockey, and it doesn't think it needs to fully fund the sport?

Fire Peter Roby. Fire him now. He was hired following a "national"search and has done nothing to prove he is a capable AD. He has not offered contract extensions to Coen or Cronin. He allowed Matz to leave a meeting and leave the school. He cut football without following through on a single promise of additional funding. He repeatedly lied to the student body about funding sources for a mythical on-campus football stadium and the Matthews Arena renovation. He allowed the university administration to discount the importance of athletics.

He needs to be replaced. He needs to be replaced with an athletic director who sees the value in winning teams, who respects the needs of coaches and student-athletes, and who lives and dies with Husky athletics.

Northeastern continues to annihilate its history

I generally try to keep this blog sports-related for a number of reasons. Most of them boil down to my reactions towards political blogs, mainly, as I find myself constantly enraged by the idiocy of the masses. Even sports blogs, like the ones on Yahoo! Sports, tend to bother me because they're filled with legions of "morans," most of whom can't name their own team's 25-man roster, much less the Angels'.

But every once in a while, something happens that I need to write about, and since I have a readership of at least 4 on this blog, it's more people than I can reach while sitting around in my dorm and whining a lot. So here we go.

First, read this: NU Coops Offered 4-Year Degrees

Northeastern is not a big name school. When I first applied to NU, it wasn't because I loved hockey. It wasn't because I wanted to live in the eighth floor of a building with a spectacular view of Fenway Park. It wasn't because of its academics. Hell, I didn't even know about the girls, or the ever-important male/female ratio, something I knew for almost every other college to which I applied.

Northeastern was not my first choice. Or my second. Or my third. It wasn't even in the top three of the schools I actually got into. Yet a startling scholarship offer kept Northeastern alive as I narrowed down my list of schools to UC San Diego, Northeastern, and another NU, Northwestern. And with the final three assembled, I visited San Diego, Evanston, and Boston.

I will admit that while visiting Northwestern, I purchased a purple shirt. I had a future just west of Chicago. I loved the campus, I loved that all my engineering classes would be in Tech, and I loved that everyone I met was unusually nice, or so it seemed, after growing up in Los Angeles. If you had asked me, on the flight from O'Hare to Logan, where I'd be walking across a stage in 4 years, the answer would have been Ryan Field.

When I arrived at Northeastern, the feeling hadn't left. Although I purchased a Northeastern shirt almost immediately, it was only to give me something to wear that wasn't a purple Northwestern shirt, a shirt I believed to be mocking the school I'd applied to on a whim, and whose student body undoubtedly desired the option to attend Northwestern. And that feeling continued past my first meetings with George, a student, and Rich Harris, an administrator, and George's roommates, and their girlfriends. I was a Northwestern man, and it was going to take something spectacular and wonderful to keep me from Chicago.

That thing was the prospect of 5 years of college with 1.5 years of work experience by the time I graduated. I had heard the term "co-op" thrown around when reading through my scholarship offer, but it wasn't really clear what the deal was, and besides, I'd gotten into Northwestern, something nobody else at North Hollywood High had achieved, despite the five or six kids who got into Stanford. But I didn't come to appreciate the value of coop until my second day at NU during my campus tour.

Coop is the only thing that Northeastern has that ranks ahead of every other Boston-area school. Harvard, Boston College, BU, Tufts, Brandeis...all of these schools have better academics. If you're interested in arts, there's Berklee, the New England Conservatory, MassArt. Even the engineering program at Northeastern can't compete with MIT, Harvard, or either of the Comm Ave schools. What NU has, and all those schools don't, and what Northwestern doesn't have, is a five year undergraduate program where I graduate 1.5 years ahead of every other kid with a BS in mechanical engineering. Those kids can get a job the second they graduate, and I'm still 6 months ahead of them when I graduate.

You want to talk about value? That's value. That's a strength at a school which has no others.

So when I hear our president start talking about how students want a 4-year coop program, I start to think about the Athletic Training program. I think about the College of Criminal Justice. Hell, I think about the football program. Northeastern, for the last 10 years, has not stood for its core values. Even the changing of the brand standard from the jovial, block font with the torch symbol to the typical academic font and seal, is another example of the changes Northeastern is undergoing at the expense of its greatest strengths.

Northeastern, until very recently, has never been the first choice for any students coming to Boston. To clarify, I mean that nobody comes to Northeastern over BU for the sake of academics. Nobody decides on Northeastern over BC for athletics. People who come to Northeastern come for coop and for Boston. Despite the jokes and realities about acceptance rates and all that nonsense, BU has never been Boston's least favorite safety school. It's been NU. Always has been.

And yet, when you ask current students how they feel about their Northeastern education, you get a wide range of opinions about class, but only one opinion about coop: it is the most important part of their education. Personally, I have learned more about engineering and business from the 1.5 years I spent working mediocre jobs than I have in 3.5 years being taught by Nobel laureates. The concept of having graduated last year from Northwestern with zero work experience scares me to death in a job market that sucks for anyone with anything less than a doctorate.

When I hear Northeastern wants to move from a standard 5-year to a 4-year coop program, this is what I hear:

We are beginning to realize that we don't have the academics of Harvard. But we think that we can attract more typical rich suburban white kids if we try to act a little more normal. We changed our logo to look more like BU's, and we think that'll help too. We haven't been able to beat these guys for the last 100 years, so we're gonna emulate them, and then we'll catch up and pass them once we get some better students. We're going to slowly, quietly phase out the five-year program and start to extinguish coop altogether because it makes it hard to compete with other schools whose students get summers off.

Northeastern, particularly under the Aoun administration, has an enormous inferiority complex. But they all fail to realize that NU's quirks are its greatest asset. You can get a crappy summer internship at any university, but with precious few exceptions, there is no other place where you can get a six month job that happens during the winter. There is no other place where you can potentially work at a single company for 1.5 years before you even graduate. So many third-term coop students get offered jobs that it seems like the entire Boston workforce is composed of NU graduates.

This is not a "can't beat 'em, so let's join 'em" scenario, as Mark so eloquently said. Northeastern has been handily destroying its competition ever since the first coop student paid off his student loans with the money he made from his job.

Getting rid of the 5-year program is the ultimate goal of this move. Students who currently want to get 4-year degrees can still complete two coops without any changes from the administration. But with the deemphasis of the 5-year program, I can guarantee that it will soon be impossible to complete a 5-year education at NU.

This is not a transition. This is an elimination. If you don't think so, ask the football team.