Brown Hockey Projected to Finish Last in ECAC Pre-Season Poll
Robert McMahon, Sports Columnist
Brown Hockey Projected to Finish Last in ECAC Pre-Season Poll
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The ECAC is one of the six Division I hockey leagues in the country. It contains teams from the Ivy League and New York State.
The top two projected teams in this year’s ECAC coaches pre-season poll, Cornell and Quinnipiac, are also projected to be the Top Ten teams in the country, Quinnipiac at #8 and Cornell at #9. Cornell, of course, has been a powerhouse team for decades, from the days of goalie Ken Dryden. Quinnipiac has emerged as a consistently solid program for the last twenty-three years after joining the ECAC, advancing to several final fours in the last 10 years and winning the NCAA championship in 2023. Dartmouth, Clarkson, and Colgate are top 5 teams in the ECAC this year.
The coaches poll shows a real drop off after that, with three Ivy League teams—Princeton, Yale, and Brown—and RPI as basement dwellers in the league. Is there a downward trend in Ivy League hockey? Are Ivy teams no longer able to compete with the other ECAC teams for good players? Both Dartmouth and Harvard are poised to have solid years. Yale won the NCAA championship as recently as 2013. Princeton, on the other hand, has had only one winning season in the last 12 years.
The Ivy team that decidedly has been unable to compete anymore in the ECAC or in non-conference play is our hometown team, Brown. The sorry state of Brown hockey can be seen in these staggering numbers:
--Since 1981, a span of 43 years, Brown has had only six winning seasons;
--Since Brown hired alumnus Brendan Whittet ’94 in 2009, a span of 14 seasons (no hockey in the COVID year), they have had only 2 winning seasons;
--Brown’s record under Whittet is 131-260-56, winning only 29% of its games;
--Only once in the last 9 years under Whittet has Brown won more than 9 games in a season;
--In the 2023-24 season under Whittet, Brown won a total of 8 games, losing its last 10 games in a row, scoring only 61 goals for the entire season;
--Brown’s average home attendance at Meehan last year was 782 fans/game, about the same attendance as a basketball game at Classical High School.
At an ECAC pre-season media zoom call on September 25th, Brown coach Whittet insisted that he doesn’t believe in pre-season polls, that Brown will be much better this year with 7 new freshman and 1 new transfer, and two of his top scorers returning from last year. Really? Much better for Brown might be a 10 or 11-win season, but still a losing season.
Why has the Brown Athletic Department let a once proud Brown program slide into oblivion? Why is a perennial losing hockey team acceptable—to the Brown Administration, to Brown’s students, to Brown’s alumni, to Brown’s donors? Losing perpetuates losing. Brown hockey is the proof.
Brown aspires to be considered a great school, a school where students are nurtured and encouraged to excel. But its ok to spend 4 years as a hockey athlete for most of the school year in a mediocre program. Go Bruins! Sure.