The NCAA tournament gets under way this afternoon. I've thought about this and I think the ideal NCAA tournament preview would chronicle what each team ate for breakfast the morning of their game, since that would seem to be a lot more important than any sort of statistics accrued over the course of the season. Brad Schlossman posted the statistic last night that in the past four years, #1 seeds are just 9-7 against #4 seeds in the first round of the tournament. Some may that call that exciting, but it's almost random to the point of being meaningless.
Still, if you're looking for some sort of preview of each team in the field, Hoover Street Rag does one of the best jobs of that annually.
College Hockey News and INCH also do fine work covering the tournament.
The United States of Hockey does a good job breaking down the reaction from Tom Anastos' hiring as the head coach of Michigan State. I still don't think it's a terrible hire, especially when compared to some of the other choices, even if Anastos has never gone through the gauntlet of College Hockey America's two-game conference tournament. The only problem I can foresee is bringing in a coach that already has public perception against him simply because he was such an outside-the-box choice into a situation that is probably more than a year away from being competitive, even with a great coach. Still, I think yesterday was probably as bad as it gets for Michigan State, and once the shock of the hire wears off and his teams take the ice, it will end up being a good hire by MSU.
As a corollary, it was unlikely that there was going to be any crossover, but I'm sure it's at least a little relief to Michigan Tech that Michigan State picked somebody that certainly wasn't going to be on their radar. There was a possibility of both schools wanting to pick a USHL head coach for a Jeff Blashill-like program transformation. Or maybe now Michigan Tech can go after Danton Cole, since we learned yesterday that he was maybe the greatest coach ever.
A theater in Omaha will be showing the UNO-Michigan tournament game on the big screen. They've reportedly sold out three theaters already.