It isn’t the job of the head office to ensure that teams that traditionally have trouble recruiting similar caliber talent to the top tier teams in the league can compete.

If that were necessary, you would never see expansion because no front office could get something like that to work.

Where does that put teams like UAA or UMD (as of late) or even MSUM? It puts them in need of finding players who are diamonds in the rough, taking what they can manage, and utilizing strategy and conditioning (in addition to solid fundamentals) to make them competitive. They get a great player or players every now and then and will continue to do so, but that’s no business of McLeod or Shepherd provided the rules and regulations are not violated in any way. I’d hate to be a fan of a team who is a perrenial doormat, but there are such teams (Tampa Bay Devil Rays, KC Royals, Houstan Texans, and so on) at every level (if you want amateur, look at the trouble Chicago of the USHL has had as of late).

Let the teams play. UAA beat UND twice last season and really, no rules had to be bent for it to happen. Let the rulebook stand and stand consistently and see what happens. If problems develop, then handle it from there.

We shouldn’t be in a state of panic if a team like Minnesota beats a team like Alaska 6-0.

However, that is water under the bridge…

The problem isn’t the rulebook, it is the officials who decide how to interpret and implement the rulebook and how consistent they are in its application once that interpretation and implementation has been made.

If obstruction were called the way it should be, I doubt any team would go unaffected, including UMN and UND. But what would happen is that the teams would be forced to alter their playing styles to accomodate for sudden implementation of rules that went uncalled.

The way to fix the WCHA isn’t by fixing the rulebook. There isn’t any problems with the rulebook. It’s there, it’s written out, and it’s not impossible to implement. The way to fix the WCHA is to make officials accountable for inconsistency, accountable for poor performance, and for Greg Shepherd to come forward and standardize what makes a call a call and what makes a non-call a non-call. Elimination of situational officiating and increasing consistency of calls (whether the fan thinks the call is good or bad) will improve the overall.

Lastly, there are officials who are just plain incompetent or have been around certain programs long enough to have lost objectivity when it comes to the program itself. These officials need to be gone. Period. Greg Shepherd and Bruce McLeod shouldn’t be concerned about parity when it comes to officiating. They should be concerned about competitiveness when it comes to quality of the league in its entirity. That does not include taking talent and skill assessments of matchups to prevent embarrassing situations. If UAA is terrible and UMN is the best team in the league, I don’t think it should be worrisome to see UMN win by 3+ goals provided the goals were legit and the rulebook followed consistently and properly.