Episode 12 of the Chasing MacNaughton Podcast from Tech Hockey Guide; “Armageddon.” This week Tim Braun, Rob Gilreath, and Dustin Lindstrom are joined by Geof Morris to discuss (times are approximate):
- Alabama-Huntsville Review with Geof Morris (2:18)
- Questions for Geof Morris (12:49)
- MTU’s 2020 Swoon (25:13)
- WCHA Standings (39:28)
- Mental Health (50:33)
- Winter Carnival (59:47)
- WCHA Predictions (64:40)
Just like most weeks, we’ll start off with the highlights from the previous weekend’s series versus the Chargers. Dustin’s split prediction proved correct as the Huskies won on Friday night 4-1 and then dropped the ball in the Saturday night game losing 3-1.
This week’s first segment covered our thoughts on the series from both sides as we were joined by Geof Morris from UAHHockey.com. The win doubled UAH’s total for the season and continued the second half slump for the Huskies. We then moved into questions for Geof about the Charger program and its uncertain future. Geof is definitely worried about the program’s future with the seven teams leaving the WCHA and we talked about that for a bit. One of the neat things Geof has in the hopper is an ELO rating system for the WCHA. We’ll be sure to share it with everyone once it’s out there, more stats to see is always fun!
Next up we focused on the team itself and what we feel is the cause of the slump we’re all wishing would end. Is it the schemes? Are we just unlucky? Finishing woes? Lingering effects from the team’s health? Special teams issues still? Not getting into the hard ice? A lack of confidence? We talk though quite a few of these ideas and wish we had the answers!
Moving forward was a bit of general WCHA talk, Tech no longer controls their own road to home ice and needs to depend on others to bring games back to Houghton for the first round. If you want to take a look at the statistics that Tim is referencing take a look at playoffstatus.com. At this point Tech is looking at only an 8% chance at fourth, 41% chance at fifth, and a 40% at sixth. It seems like at this point we’re looking at traveling with a strong possibility of that travel being up to Fairbanks if we maintain 5th place, or playing four or five straight against Northern.
Bell Let’s Talk Day, an annual awareness campaign and fundraiser for mental health that gets a lot of attention in the within the hockey community, was on the 29th of January this year. This is the 10th year the event has been run and this year broke records once again for interactions online. Bell, a Canadian telecom company, donates five cents per interaction to mental health organizations. Mental health is a topic near and dear to the Husky Hockey fan base and we encourage any one that needs help to reach out!
This week is Winter Carnival with Lake State coming in. It’s the first time we all disagree on the prediction for this upcoming weekend. Two of us see a sweep coming, but disagree on who is holding the brooms. Around the WCHA this weekend the big series is Mankato versus Northern and we put in our predictions for that series.
Finally I want to thank our newest Patreon, Michael Crawford! We’re loving the support we’ve seen for the podcast and we’re getting closer and closer to Tim needing to record a monthly recruiting update!
Cut for time
This week was a long one… 109 minutes. We try to get the podcast itself to an hour, but we talked a lot this week with recording on, so there’s about 40 minutes of extra for the patreons. We have some more questions with Geof Morris about the coaching situation and the status of the program at UAH, which really is a mirror image of Tech down south, another DII playup with heavy focus on engineering and academics. Some more stats talk lead into talking about how this year feels in comparison to last year. That snowballs into a bit of generational debate and Joe’s examples on the show. And finally we wrap it up with Matt Cavender’s twitter question about the positives we see. If that extra content is something your interested in, hop over to the Patreon page and sign up! We’re just 3 away from our goal to start a monthly extra podcast covering recruiting.
