A little over 12 weeks ago in bitterly cold Punxsutawney – it was minus 3 degrees that morning – the seer of seers was both right and wrong.
The part Punxsutawney Phil got right was his prediction of six more weeks of winter.
The part he got wrong is that 12 weeks later we still have what I consider the vestiges of winter – temperatures in the 30s.
OK, technically Phil didn’t get it wrong because he doesn’t prognosticate further than six weeks, but a little heads-up that we were facing a double winter allotment might have been nice!
As I write this column, the three different forecasting services I check each show the low temperatures this Thursday, Friday and Saturday will be between 34 and 37 degrees. I should note that those are for the dates of April 30, May 1 and May 2.. May 2 with a low temperature in the 30’s – sheesh! One of the services even predicts Sunday, May 3 will dip into the 30’s as well.
Yet most of the trees and shrubs are blooming. I’ve mowed our grass several times already, washed the road-salt residue off the garage floor, turned off the gas to our indoor fireplace (saves $13 a month!), and was getting ready to do a final wash-and-fold of all my heavy sweatpants and sweatshirts.
Thankfully we haven’t given up yet on our flannel sheets because we’re obviously going to still need them.
Now, all this cold, along with a very chilly rain, made for a weather-challenged Blue-White weekend this past Saturday and Sunday. It resulted in a disappointing turnout – at least by past Penn State standards — for what we are now calling the Blue White Practice.
Which reminded me that the last time we Penn State fans were in Beaver Stadium was two days before Phil’s prognostication. When 74,575 showed up on Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026 in 16-degree temperatures to cheer on the Penn State men’s ice hockey team in a game against Big Ten rival Michigan State.
At the time Penn State was ranked No. 5 in the country and Michigan State was ranked No. 2. And fellow Big Ten team Michigan was No. 1. And all three, along with Wisconsin, made the NCAA Tournament at the end of the season.
Yet, no Big Ten team won the NCAA national championship this year.
In fact, since the creation of the Big Ten men’s ice hockey conference for the 2013-2014 season, no Big Ten team has won the NCAA national championship. Which seems odd.
Now, in the NCAA D1 women’s ice hockey tournament, three of the final four teams were teams from Big Ten schools – Penn State, Wisconsin and Ohio State. And the final was between Ohio State and Wisconsin. But there is no Big Ten conference yet in women’s ice hockey, so the championship went to the WCHA, not the Big Ten.
That aside, elsewhere Big Ten sports teams have been on an amazing run this year, having won national titles in football and both men’s and women’s basketball.
And in men’s wrestling – the NCAA sport that geographically meshes closest with men’s ice hockey – Penn State won the national title, and four of the top five teams were Big Ten teams.
To illustrate, here’s the NCAA’s map of the schools that competed in D1 men’s wrestling during the 2025-26 academic year:
A lot of them exist within the “footprint” of the Big Ten. Now, here’s a map of the schools that competed in D1 men’s ice hockey during the 2025-26 academic year:
From the looks of it, men’s ice hockey is even more contained in Big Ten “country” than men’s wrestling – a sport where the Big ten dominates (Note: the two schools in Alaska that play ice hockey do not show up on the above map). Wouldn’t it make sense that a sport that is primarily played in the area where most Big Ten schools are located might occasionally be won by a Big Ten team? Why is it then, that in the decade-plus history of the Big Ten men’s ice hockey conference, no Big Ten team has won an NCAA championship?
Well, you might ask, If not the Big Ten, then who is winning these national championships? Below are the national champions for every year since the advent of the Big Ten ice hockey conference:
2026 Denver
2025 Western Michigan
2024 Denver
2023 Quinnipiac
2022 Denver
2021 Massachusetts
2020 Canceled due to COVID-19
2019 Minnesota Duluth
2018 Minnesota Duluth
2017 Denver
2016 North Dakota
2015 Providence
2014 Union (N.Y.)
2013 Yale
Geez, that’s not a really impressive list in the world of major sports where most of us fans exist, is it? Certainly, in men’s basketball there’s the occasional Gonzaga-type team that wins games, but there’s only one major public university anywhere on that list – the University of Massachusetts. And they now play most sports in the MAC.
So again, what’s up? Why is there not a single Big Ten team winning a national championship in ice hockey? Especially now in this time of NIL and ballooning athletic department budgets.
I mean, the University of Denver, a small private college with just over 6,000 students and under 400 student athletes playing only 18 sports – no football – has won four, count ‘em, four, national championships since the Big Ten ice hockey conference has existed. Heck, Denver’s entire university budget is only about four times the size of just the athletic department budget of Penn State.
Well, if you ask hockey old timers, they’ll tell you it’s just straight-up animosity at the Big Ten. When Penn State announced they would start a D1 hockey team, that meant there were now enough Big Ten teams to form its own ice hockey conference – and it almost immediately did.
But when it did that, it pulled Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Wisconsin and Minnesota out of, in most cases, longstanding CCHA and WCHA conference affiliations. The teams left behind in those conferences felt abandoned and their fans felt jilted as these traditions were tossed to the wind, in what looked to them like a simple money grab.
Because there was certainly some thinking that these major public universities with athletic budgets of $100 million plus would just take over the college hockey world. And that the smaller teams, the Denvers and Quinnipiacs of the world, who had held college hockey together for a century, would go by the wayside.
Obviously, that hasn’t happened. And, as I said, the hockey old timers will tell you that these smaller schools will fight tooth-and-nail to keep the Big Ten from winning a men’s ice hockey national championship as long as possible – forever if they could.
Now, in public some of the smaller schools will be a bit more kind in their choice of words about it. Such as Denver head coach David Carle, who after winning Denver’s third national title in five years last month said, “You want a smaller school that doesn’t have this behemoth budget and alumni base to still be able to be successful. I think we are proof of concept that it’s still possible.” He went on to say, “You don’t have to be big in hockey to be good.”
Which is a nice way of saying, we’re not going quietly on this, Big Ten!
Granted, I have never been a huge supporter of Penn State’s move to the Big Ten, but as a fan it is somewhat satisfying to see the conference doing well as a whole from an athletic standpoint. And it would be nice for a Big Ten team to win a national championship in men’s ice hockey. It of course follows that as Penn Staters we definitely want that team to be Penn State.
So, here’s to hoping that next Feb. 2 when Punxsutawney Phil invariably predicts six more weeks of winter (he sees his shadow about four times more often than not), that those cold winter temperatures, and maybe another outside game, finally lead to a team in blue-and-white adidas gear parading around Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. with a national championship trophy — and this long Big Ten drought coming to an end.
