Thursday afternoon, the NCAA announced a change that college hockey fans had been anticipating for a while.
There had been talk about a standardized overtime rule that applied throughout the country, as conferences had begun to deviate in how they determined winners of games.
The move to standardization is good. But what the committee came up with isn’t.
Bucking the trend of the NHL, AHL, ECHL, OHL, WHL, QMJHL, BCHL, AJHL and USHL, the NCAA announced a move to a standardized 5-on-5 five minute overtime across all conferences during regular season play. There are a number of problems with the process of coming up with this decision (seriously, the NCHC is mad), but that shouldn’t overshadow how problematic the shift to 5-on-5 is.