Strong words, at least for Jackson, following Sunday's game:
by wearendhockey (2020-03-09 12:16:08)

“Calls that they made last night were different than the calls they made tonight. Watching it on film, it’s an embarrassment, actually.” Little consolation, yes. Minnesota lost last year on what their fans thought was an awful call in overtime. I suppose we're even now.

The Big Ten will almost certainly have at least 2 teams in the NCAAs, as PSU is a lock no matter what, and OSU will make it without a billion things going wrong whether or not they beat Michigan on Saturday. Michigan has a punchers chance, but they need the other leagues to limit the upsets. A win next week against OSU makes them a likely NCAA team, but does not assure it. Minnesota is out in all likelihood if the lose to PSU next week, but if they win, they will be rooting for the rest of the leagues to go chalk and they'd have at least reason to pay attention even if they lose in the final.

(Despite the oddly vague language in the Tribune's press release-like article about yesterday's game, Notre Dame will not make the tournament under any circumstances in case anyone was wondering)

After a big splash in the Big Ten in 2018 both Notre Dame and the conference came back to Earth a little bit. Notre Dame introduced themselves to the league with a 13-0-0 blitzkrieg and the league sent three teams to the NCAAs in 2018 with all 3 making the Frozen Four. That was only the second time one league sent as many as 3 teams to a FF during the 16 team era of the tournament (2005 was the other as all 4 were WCHA teams). Since the sparkling start to our association with the conference though Notre Dame has only managed to go 24-26-7 in conference play and the league didn't fare so well in the NCAAs last year (2 teams went 1-2 overall).

2 1/2 seasons of sub-.500 Big Ten play and missing the NCAAs this year is enough of a sample to see the trend is clearly in the wrong direction. For the first time in his Notre Dame career, Jackson has seen drop off from the previous season 2 years in a row. It would be interesting to see what kind of changes are in store to reverse that trend. A reboot, Jackson 2.0 perhaps? Would it be asking too much to have a group of freshmen like we had in either 2006 or 2007? Yeah, probably wishful thinking.