Northern Michigan officially said they were not interested in rejoining the WCHA.
I guess it takes away one of the WCHA's potential options, but Northern Michigan wasn't the strongest option to begin with. Their arena just barely met WCHA standards in terms of size, so it's not like they would be a huge financial benefit for the WCHA. Making a trip to Marquette wouldn't have been that desirable to some of the western teams in the league either.
Northern Michigan cited wanting to keep their exposure in the state of Michigan by staying in the CCHA, which is probably a good idea. They've made fairly frequent trips to Detroit for the CCHA tournament and usually have a pretty nice following. I imagine they have a lot more alums in southeastern Michigan than they do in the Twin Cities, and would likely make it to Detroit more often than they would to St. Paul.
The other reason NMU cited was a little more interesting. They weren't interested in paying the league entry fees and losing out on tournament revenue for the first couple of years. In his conference call last week, WCHA commissioner Bruce McLeod said that those two issues could be negotiable. With Nebraska-Omaha looking like the last option, it could be interesting to see how just how negiotable those fees are. If the WCHA was willing to waive them completely, that would have to make the WCHA very tempting to UNO.