Sitting at 15-1-2 on the year and with a CHA regular season title under its belt, Penn State women’s hockey has had – by an immeasurably large margin – the best season in program history.
A quick look around the country during a COVID-19 impacted season, only Northeastern has more victories at this point of the year and no team finds itself undefeated.
So by any reasonable metric one could make the argument that Penn State has had as good of a season as any team in the country. You can only beat who it in front of you, and you can only beat them so many times.
Therein-lies the rub though for a Nittany Lion team that has given up just 24 goals all year while scoring 63: the CHA isn’t very good.
And this matters for one very large and looming reason; Penn State could lose this weekend against Mercyhurst or sometime during the CHA Tournament and suddenly find itself out of the postseason conversation in favor of teams from ‘better’ conferences. The Nittany Lions’ only certain ticket to the postseason is the automatic-bid through the CHA Tournament.
Coming up short of the automatic bid leaves the choice to a selection committee that may or may not feel inclined to give one of the four at-large bids for the eight-team postseason field to a ‘better’ team from a ‘better’ conference.
“What is what is frustrating is just the lack of respect our league gets from an overall standpoint,” Penn State coach Jeff Kampersal said on Wednesday
“There’s previous years where both Mercyhurst and Robert Morris have been two really strong teams where they potentially both could go [but only the automatic bid did]. This year it’s going to be interesting because there are no crossover [games between conferences] So perceptions will be based on last year like ‘Program X is really good. They’ve been really good for a long time so therefore they still must be good and still must be better than any CHA team.’ I’m sure they’re gonna pay attention to these Mercyhurst games coming up.”
Kampersal’s assessment isn’t wrong, although it wouldn’t be unfair to say the CHA is far from the best conference in America [RIT and Lindenwood winning a total of three games this year not helping any]. Nevertheless, Penn State can only play the teams on the schedule, it can only beat them so convincingly and it can only do it so many times. If you have to go almost undefeated to make the postseason, it might say something more about the format than anything else.
Of course the good news for the Nittany Lions is that they control their own destiny and an upcoming series against Mercyhurst ought to be a much stiffer, resume-boosting test than four-straight games against RIT now in the rearview. In turn those wins will continue to help Penn State’s cause. Beyond that the Nittany Lions will be the No. 1 seed in the CHA Tournament and ought to find itself in the championship game.
And when it’s all said and done, short of a collapse this weekend the selection committee may very well have already penciled in Penn State for the postseason field.
There are bigger issues at play beyond just this season, for instance how Penn State goes about scheduling in the future. On the one hand Kampersal wants to inflate his team’s resume as best he can [Penn State’s strength of schedule is 16th in the nation out of 29 teams] but losing will only hurt that particular postseason cause. On the other hand, Penn State having one historically great season doesn’t mean the program-building is done, and in turn playing more difficult opponents comes with its own set of measuring sticks. You don’t get better by playing bad teams, and you don’t learn where you stand without challenging yourself.
“It’s one that you battle with each year but for now in our program I think we want to play the best teams that we can possibly play,” Kampersal said. “And sharpen our skills and see like where we stand against those teams even if we lose games along the way. But also as we get going further, then you might start to like strategize a little bit more, not necessarily a fan of that but like, but that’ll come into play.”
For now though, it’s all about one thing – Mercyhurst, because the Nittany Lions have come too far to trip up on their own future-thinking now.
