Motivating Factors
The following article appeared October on the New England Hockey Journal (NEHJ) Web site.
By Elliot Olshansky
It’s a well-known truth that when the NCAA tournament rolls around, just about everyone loves an upset. So, it was only natural that there would be some amount of excitement back in March when Yale — the top overall seed in the 2011 NCAA men’s Division 1 tournament — lost to the third seed in the East regional, Minnesota-Duluth, while playing a stone’s throw from campus at Webster Bank Arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport, Conn.
The dirty little secret, however, is that more than any other high seed to fall in recent years — whether it was Minnesota against Holy Cross in 2006, Michigan against Air Force in 2009, or Denver against RIT in 2010 — some three-quarters of the college hockey world was dying to see the Bulldogs fail.
When eventual NCAA champion Minnesota-Duluth defeated the home-standing Bulldogs one night after going through No. 2 seed Union, many fans and pundits — mostly from points west — got just the result they were hoping for. Not only did the Yale and Union losses give support to the “EZAC” moniker bestowed on the league by fans of other conferences, but Yale’s loss in particular backed up the notion that the team’s superlative regular-season success and high national ranking were products of a weak schedule and that coach Keith Allain’s team was — with apologies to conference and Ivy League rival Princeton — a “paper tiger.”
