First off, with the once-proud conference now in shambles, and after being embarrassingly silent the day the news came out, let's take a look at the WCHA's reaction on Friday:
Right then. Excellent leadership. There's no mention of it on the league website, though judging by the layout, it's still 2002 there, so it might take a while to get that news up.
Coming in a close second was College Hockey Inc., who reminded us that they're still hosting a golf outing, even if we might have been a bit distracted by the lesser news of a significant number of college hockey programs being thrown into major jeopardy. Though I will note that College Hockey Inc. is beholden to a lot of different interests, and clearly not everybody in college hockey is moving in the same direction these days, putting them in a bit of an awkward spot.
Alaska-Anchorage athletic director Steve Cobb gets points for being the most candid in the wake of his school getting screwed:
"At our meeting in April we voted to extend an invitation to Miami and Notre Dame," Cobb said, referring to a pair of CCHA teams. "That passed with 100 percent of the vote. Nobody said they were unhappy. We left the April meeting and basically some of them contacted Notre Dame and Miami and said, 'Don't take the WCHA invitation, we're going to invite you to join our super league.'
"I blame everybody for being less than honest with their own league members. It's a really sneaky back-door deal."
Meanwhile, Cobb said the remaining WCHA athletic directors will be meeting in Minnesota next week to discuss their future. He wasn't clear if the current WCHA administration would be there, but I would assume not since there's no Final Five check to collect.
It was announced today that St. Cloud wasn't interested in joining the Secondary Six, which everyone had a good laugh at since nobody ever asked them. That's potentially a very ballsy/dumb statement to make though, since St. Cloud is the most natural next choice for the new conference.
In fact, that statement looks even ballsier/dumber in the wake of today's news that Western Michigan head coach Jeff Blashill was pulling a Josh Porter and becoming a new assistant coach for the Detroit Red Wings. That news has spawned rumors that Western Michigan may be back on the outside of the equation, which kind of tells you all you need to know about the long-term planning and stability of this enterprise when something as fickle as a coaching change is that big of a deal.
Metaphor #2 for the Secondary Six will come on Wednesday, when the league is officially announced in Colorado Springs in front of no one, because it's nowhere near two-thirds of the league's members.
We talked a little yesterday about the Secondary Six's influence in major media markets, and you can definitely see the type of impact it had in Cincinnati, just 35 miles away from charter member Miami, where they were all over the story of Barry Larkin's brother going to jail for drunk driving(Imagine the culture clash of them trying to explain that you can be punished for drunk driving to some of their new conference-mates). I mean, the guy is almost(and should be) a Hall-of-Famer. Or at least has the same mother as one. I'm sure they just ran out of space on the internet for the huge news of these mega-giants conglomerating.
Seriously, can anyone find any sort of reaction from the Miami perspective of this thing beyond the epic 142 words it garnered in something called the Oxford (Not University) Press?