NCAA Frozen Four: If Ferris State Beats BC, Where Will The Upset Rank?

Jerry York, now in his 18th season as the professor of puck at Boston College, knows from his Bowling Green State University days what counterpart Bob Daniels of Ferris State is going through.

Since a York-led squad of BGSU Falcons won their first national title in their first-ever championship game in 1984, only Lake Superior State (1988) and Maine (1993) have pulled a similar feat.

Daniels’ Bulldogs, putting in just their second NCAA tournament appearance and first since 2003, have already elevated their all-time bar just by reaching the Frozen Four. They bumped it up another rung on Thursday through a gritty, 3-1 triumph over Union College.

A combination of superior scoring depth and a cornucopia of big-game experience make York’s current students at BC the decisive favorite for Saturday’s title tilt in Tampa. York has 14 rostered holdovers from his latest national title in 2010 and has himself taken the Eagles to 11 Frozen Fours and eight championship games in the last 15 years.

But if the Bulldogs can rerun their act from back-to-back 2-1 victories in the Midwest Regional and Thursday’s semifinal victory, it will make for a genuinely unique twist in history.

“You always want to play the best to be the best,” said Ferris State senior Jordie Johnston in Friday’s press conference.

Alluding to the York-led BC hegemony of the last decade-plus, and especially their string of five championship games in the last seven years, Johnston added, “Hopefully we can start to create a dynasty of our own.”

Tripping up one dynasty at the final frontier of a season and feeding off one’s newfound momentum? That doesn’t happen often in either the collegiate or professional ranks.

Historically learned crossover fans from the NHL radius might look at, say, the 1973-74 Philadelphia Flyers knocking off Bobby Orr’s two-time champion Bruins to become the first expansion team to win a Stanley Cup. And then there was the New York Islanders of the early 1980s, who won their first of four straight titles by beating the same Philadelphia franchise who had repeated titles in 1974 and 1975.

But in terms of a first-time Frozen Four participant knocking off a tradition-laden counterpart to claim its first banner, there are no parallels to that scenario in the NCAA morgue.

Since the tournament’s seventh year of existence in 1954, when Rensselaer made Minnesota a repeat runner-up, no program has entered its first national title game and defeated a team whose current roster included players who had been there before.

If you want something remotely close, look back 21 years to another case of a Michigan-based CCHA team knocking off another Hockey East program based out of Commonwealth Avenue.

In 1991, Northern Michigan reached its first Frozen Four in 10 years and first title game in 11 years. The Wildcats would win their first and still only crown in school history through an 8-7 overtime triumph over a Boston University team that had lost in the 1990 semifinals.

By the way, and BC buffs who believe in omens may want to avert their eyes from this paragraph. That loss to NMU capped off Terriers’ coach Jack Parker’s 18th year at the helm just as York is rounding out 18 years with his alma mater Saturday night.

Other than that, all of the 64 NCAA Division I men’s hockey champions have either amplified their program’s established winning persona or spawned a new tradition at the expense of a fellow newbie. York’s old squad at Bowling Green, for example, denied Minnesota-Duluth in each program’s first championship game.

The aforementioned Lake Superior team from 1988 knocked off a St. Lawrence squad that had just ended the program’s 26-year hiatus from the Frozen Four.

The victorious Mainers of 1993 had a junior and senior class that brooked the growing pains of losing in the 1991 national semifinals. Some of their immediate predecessors had reached the 1988 and 1989 Frozen Four.

The same cannot be said about Daniels and Co., who were a one-year wonder a few generations ago and only just came back into the limelight. They will now embrace the challenge of tangling with the most accomplished coach and program of the present era.

Accordingly, a Ferris State victory Saturday night will be virtually impossible to dismiss as anything short of the most monumental title game upset in U.S. college hockey history.

Quotes for this story were obtained firsthand at Friday’s press conference