MEGAN DAVIS:  Hi Gopher fans. It’s Megan Davis with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to The Gold Standard, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota sports.

Today’s gonna be a pretty quick episode but there’s been some huge news in Minnesota college hockey. Both head coach Bob Motzko and Brad Frost are out for the Gophers. The decision came earlier this week with releases from athletic director Mark Coyle, basically announcing that both Frost and Motzko would not be returning next season. 

The Frost firing came first from Coyle but I would say it was much less predicted from Gopher fans because of Frost’s record with the team. He’s spent 19 seasons working with the women’s Gophers and he’s led them to four NCAA Championships, the most recent one being in 2022, numerous WCHA titles and more. 

And so the firing came definitely as a surprise to both me and the Minnesota Daily’s women’s hockey reporter, Samantha Roering, because yes, they exited the tournament early in the second round, as long as the WCHA tournament this season. But it just didn’t seem like it would be enough to fire such an accomplished hockey coach especially because recruiting seemed to have been going well. They were making progress. 

I think the big thing, if I could get into Mark Coyle’s mind for a second, is I would believe that they saw that Abbey Murphy spent five years with the team and is, you know, going to be a very high draft pick in the PWHL this upcoming summer, and yet they failed to accomplish another championship with her. 

And that, I think made Coyle believe that the program was falling short. And he noted this in the press release saying that, you know, women’s hockey is supposed to be contending at a higher level. Kind of between the lines saying that they weren’t competing the way they were supposed to, they weren’t winning as much as they were supposed to. 

And that was gonna be the reason for the firing, which I don’t know, it’s a, considering how many other coaches have gotten much more leeway with the Gophers. I mean, P.J. Fleck just got an extension and the football team isn’t as nearly as close as the women’s hockey team has been. 

Just kinda shows that, obviously I believe that Coyle has someone in mind out there and it was Frost’s time to go. He spent 42 years coaching. He was at St. Cloud before coming to the Gophers. They said it was time for a change. 

Coyle’s gonna have a press conference on Monday kind of discussing the changes and hopefully giving some more reasoning behind them besides the few sentences he gave in the press release. But until then, that’s kind of all we have on it. 

I saw that a lot of the women’s hockey players took to Instagram and stuff to basically say thank you for his time with the Gophers. And, I mean, they weren’t, they weren’t media statements, you know, they, they weren’t long, lengthy, but it seemed like a lot of the players who had worked with him for one year or for five years were really grateful to have him as a coach and kind of wished him the best in his future endeavors. 

And Coyle said the same thing in the release, that, you know, he’s a great coach and we wish him the best. He’s not super old, and so I believe that for college hockey teams looking for a new coach. I wouldn’t be surprised if he jumps to the top of their list of people to hire because he has the experience, he has the stacked resume. 

He has, I believe, the most wins in Gopher’s history. And you know, he really served Minnesota well during these times, the women’s team.

And he’ll be greatly missed. And it would be interesting kind of to see how women’s hockey balances this.

But it’s gonna be very hard for the new incoming coach to live up to Frost’s standards and his records and all that. And it, it really is gonna create probably the biggest tone shift in college women’s hockey that we’ve seen in a very long time just because of his exit. 

So that’ll be interesting. And like I said, with player turnover, Abbey Murphy, people will be gone. There’s a couple other great seniors on the program who will no longer be a part next season. And so they’re gonna have a new coach and then a bunch of new players. 

Abbey Murphy was really their rock this season of someone that defenders were always gonna flock to, and she was being relied on pretty heavily to kind of get the momentum of the game moving up and now she won’t be there. So it’s either gonna be time for a new player to step up and kind of take over that role from her. 

Unlike the Ben Johnson firing that we saw last year and all the players leaving, you know, that was completely starting afresh. And this one’s gonna be a little bit different where you’re gonna have, you know, the majority of the team still there. Hopefully they won’t lose anyone because of this firing. So I’m very curious to see kind of who he brings in. 

And then a day later Bob Motzko, the men’s hockey coach, was not fired, they mutually agreed to part ways. A theory from our reporter here was that Motzko kind of saw the writing on the wall and decided that, you know, he was gonna kind of talk and let himself go, or you know, if you’re gonna fire Frost, Motzko has more reasons to kind of leave the building.

They won the fewest amount of games since the 1971-72 season and it was not a good turnaround. The entire year it seemed like the players were kind of jilted. They weren’t competing at the level of Gopher’s hockey that so many fans are used to. I know a lot of people expressed a lot of disappointment with how the season was going.

And you know, Motzko has been with a team for eight seasons. And depending on who you ask, some people would say they did the best they could. Others would be like, the Gophers should have walked away with a championship. 

And so Motzko and the University of Minnesota parted ways. Motzko had two more years left on his contract of 750,000, I believe. And so I don’t know how the contracts work, and I’m assuming that that means he’s walking away from that money to go pursue a different opportunity. 

Coyle, once again, thanked him for his time, said they’ll be opening up a nationwide search for a new men’s hockey coach, and will discuss more of the details on Monday. The wording of the two releases were very different. In the Frost one, it seemed focused on kind of what they couldn’t accomplish. And in the Motzko one it seemed focused on what Motzko could accomplish, which, you know, when you compare their two records, it’s seems like that should be flipped. But it, it wasn’t. 

You know, words mean everything. It’s obviously made a choice there to do that. But I also suspect that maybe it had to do with the fact that they weren’t kind of ready to release information about Motzko. The news first came from Fox9 and their sports director there kind of announcing that Motzko wouldn’t be returning next season.

And so I don’t know if they were scrambling or what kind of happened because Fox9 announced the news and then it took a couple hours for the University of Minnesota to actually kind of confirm it and release their own statement on the news. And it was much shorter than Frosts’. So just really a shock to let go of both hockey coaches within a 24 hours of each other.

And basically, I mean, when you, when you release both of the coaches, you know, this means Gophers hockey’s gonna have a huge shift in its identity and hopefully for the better. My own theories about why Motzko was let go, I wrote a little bit about this when the news was announced that he would not be returning, is that his kind of old school way of doing things. 

The Gophers have had a very successful hockey program based on recruiting and based on the fact that so many great hockey players are born right here in state. And so their incentive to come play for the University of Minnesota tends to be a little higher. And we’ve seen that over the years and it seemed like Motzko was kind of really relying on that.

But with the introduction of NIL and the introduction of the CHL it just became more apparent that, I don’t know if you can run a program like that anymore. You know, they only have so much NIL money to work with because the majority of it will go to football programs. And this year the NCAA ruled that you can recruit from the CHL or Junior Canadian Hockey Leagues.

And so we saw a lot of players come from the CHL and decide to plan the NCAA instead. Kind of most famously, as Penn State recruited Gavin McKenna from the CHL, and he made the most immediate impact, but almost every other team in the Big Ten did a summer thing where they picked up really influential and effective players from the CHL.

I believe Minnesota and Notre Dame were the only two kind of of the Big Ten to not participate in that. Which when you see all your competitors doing one thing and you decide to not, you know people turn their heads, they look and they, they kind of question. 

And I believe earlier in the year, Motzko gave a statement basically saying, we’re going to observe kind of how these CHL players make an impact, and then we’ll go from there. Obviously he had belief in his team or, but you know, so many important Gophers hockey players were lost either to, they no longer had eligibility or they were moving on to the NHL, so the team needed to restructure. 

And there was a glaring opportunity right in Gopher’s hockey to do so with the inclusion of the CHL as a recruitment tool. And Motzko chose not to. And the players that did go to these Big Ten teams are the ones at the top of the standings. 

And it’s hard not to draw kind of your own conclusions from that and to, you know, say, well, maybe Gophers hockey could have had a better chance if they actually decided to do so instead of observe. But that is purely speculation on my part. Obviously until Monday we don’t know the full reasons why he was let go. It’s all kind of up in the air at this point.

In a more fun note women’s basketball will start their March Madness run, Friday, March 20. They’ll play Green Bay University in the first round. They will be here on Minnesota campus and then if they are able to overcome Green Bay, there’s two options, but I’m seeing right now a lot of people are expecting them to face Ole Miss or the University of Mississippi.

This will be their first March Madness run since I believe the 2017-2018 season. There’s been a ton of press about it just because it’s been so long, especially for Minnesota basketball program. And not a lot of national recognition. You know, they’re kind of this, I mean, they have a higher seating, but they’re kind of this curve ball team of nobody kind of knows how they look.

It’s a very successful program, but it hasn’t, it’s not a program that’s been successful for a very long time. And yeah, so Samantha did a piece on that, basically just kind of highlighting what their attitudes are like going into this first round and they’re riding high. A lot of it is just kind of based on, these girls have played together for a long time.

I mean, in terms of college career, you know, they’ve been with each other their entire college career. And they’ve a lot of trust in each other and they have a lot of trust in coach Plitzuweit and how she operates the system. And so it’ll be exciting. I am expecting them to take down Green Bay, just because it is a, you know, smaller school.

They’ve beaten them before, I believe. And they’ve just, you know, they ended their season on a good note. If they make it past Green Bay, then they’ll play again on Sunday and they’ll face the winner of the other game. I will say though, I was looking at The Athletic and doesn’t seem like anyone has any hope in Minnesota, despite them being the number four seed in their bracket.

They are not expected to make it past Ole Miss. So hopefully they can because then they get to move on and they’ll travel to Sacramento to play some more. Since March Madness for Gophers basketball comes around so sparingly. I’m just kind of enjoying the ride. I’m enjoying to see like how these girls kind of really compete.

They did fantastic in the WBIT last year when they didn’t make March Madness and they were just barely out. And I saw a lot of girls kind of take that next step in the playoffs. And so I’m hoping they could do the same thing here. 

I think the biggest challenge is that these aren’t gonna be teams they’ve faced before or teams they have a lot of familiarity with. And so obviously they’ll be looking at a lot of film and a lot of tape, but, it’s not gonna be until they’re on the court where they’re just gonna have to be able to adjust very quickly and kind of get the job done. 

Yeah, exciting stuff in Gophers women’s basketball and obviously when we do the podcast next we’ll talk more about whether they win won or lost and kind of where they go from here because it is Amaya Battle and Sophie Hart’s last season. So this is their, you know, kind of last dance. 

Women’s basketball is so competitive this year that I’m not expecting a, I’m not expecting a tournament win, just because the beast at the end of the tunnel are UCLA and UConn and they just kind of look unbeatable. 

But for Coach P.’s future at Minnesota I’m hoping they could take it, take it further, because once they kind of show that they can get, if they can get deep in the tournament, it means that recruiting’s gonna go up and, you know, they could really establish this program to be something special and something that Gopher fans haven’t seen in a, in a kind of a while.

That’s kind of all we have today. We’ll talk some more about the rest of Gopher sports in our next episode, and maybe the introduction of the outdoor track and field season, some baseball, some softball and where they’re at. But just wanted to give a quick little update on what’s hockey looking like and what women’s basketball is looking like.

This episode is by Megan Davis and produced by Ceci Heinen. As always, we appreciate you listening in, and feel free to send us a message to our email inbox [email protected] with any questions, comments or concerns. 

I’m Megan Davis, and this has been The Gold Standard.