USA Today/USA Hockey Magazine released their first national poll of the season today and it looks like this:
1. Boston College
2. North Dakota
3. Miami
4. Michigan
5. Yale
6. St. Cloud
7. Maine
8. New Hampshire
9. Minnesota-Duluth
10. Cornell
11. Denver
12. Alaska
13. Wisconsin
14. Boston University
15. Minnesota
Quick thoughts:
-Boston College is clearly number one by a pretty wide margin here. It's standard practice for the first poll of the year to put last year's winner at the top, regardless of how much they lost, but BC is going to be really, really good.
-I'm not sure I buy Michigan as the fourth best team out there.
-There's four teams from the Oversize Consonant ranked ahead of the two that could soon be leaving them, and none of the four have a ton of recruits that Minnesota and Wisconsin seriously went after.
-I kind of laughed at Minnesota being ranked, but they're the sixth Oversize Consonant on the list, which is about where I picked them, so I guess. It doesn't really say much for people's opinions on the single-font CCHA.