Takuto Maruki
Ideal and the real
Again, it says a lot that this sort of 'should college hockey separate from the NCAA' comes from a place of ignorance about the sport writ large, both within the D1 hockey landscape, and the symbiotic relationship between it, major junior hockey (especially now with the NCAA/CHL agreement) and subsequent junior A leagues - and admittedly, the somewhat throwaway and flippant line from Matt's article fits that ignorance, but considering his main beat is college football and basketball to a lesser extent - though not at all ignorant to learning new things (as I've given him a crash course on the CHL structure to the best of my ability through DM's which he appreciated) I'll cut him some slack.
I don't blame people for positing these questions though, especially considering where the sport as a whole is at, and if things go certain ways with legislation in red states WRT international student athletes supposedly taking away spots from locals being picked up by observant Republicans in the federal government, there's ultimately going to have to be a reckoning by the NHL to pick a side in order to protect the entire development pipeline, and they're likely going to side with the one that they subsidize almost wholly.
Realistically though - a vast, *vast* majority of sports outside of CFB and CBB are buried on ESPN+ and ESPNU as cheap filler content. Even within those two sports, the vast majority of conferences outside of the Power 4 and the Big East (and in the case of CFB, the entirety of the MAC essentially sacrificed any sort of national footprint for the cheap hit of TV revenue) are stuck on specialty channels. The entirety of this chicken and egg scenario can be birthed back to NCAA v. Oklahoma Board of Regents - and by this point it's too late to put the genie back into the bottle. By this point, leagues like the NHL, MLS, and MLB might as well do as much as they can to protect one of their main pipelines, because the NCAA, and the sports at large, are going to take the easy payday 10 times out of 10.
More people are cord cutting then ever before and going strictly to streaming services. Why would linear TV help anything when it's just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic and most sports leagues are trying to figure out what to do next now that RSN's are going the way of the dodo?
