NCAA Hockey 101: Are Jerry York’s 1,000 wins an unmatchable feat?

For a few years now, Boston College head coach Jerry York has been the winningest college hockey coach in history. He passed Ron Mason, the long-time Michigan State coach (at 924) and kept right on rolling.

Now he’s up to an even 1,000, having demolished UMass 8-0 on the road Friday night, and tied UConn on Saturday. This is a staggering number. No one else is even close. Michigan’s Red Berenson is 176 back as the active No. 2 — albeit in almost 400 fewer games — but he’s also six years’ York’s senior, so the odds Berenson even closes the gap marginally over the remainder of their careers are basically non-existent.

York will coach as long as he likes and probably also continue to be one of the better coaches in college hockey. Boston College can attract a level of player few others can, and his support staff has done an excellent job in recent years to buttress his leadership. His players love him despite his kindly disciplinarian streak and so does just about anyone who’s dealt with him professionally.

Probably the thing that makes him so great as a coach is that he is still almost needlessly competitive, and in search of just about any edge he can gain to win more than the five national titles he’s racked up already. There’s been a lot of talk about a “gentleman’s agreement” among the vast majority of college coaches to not-try to recruit other team’s commits after a verbal commitment but before they sign a National Letter of Intent. York’s all set with honoring that, which he doesn’t need to be because BC gets great recruits all the time, but man he wants that edge like you wouldn’t believe.

Ditto his support for the Big Ten’s age limit proposal. These are positions you can criticize for some very, very good reasons, but you at least see where York is coming from.

You’d think after 1,000 wins he wouldn’t have a heck to give about that kind of thing, but he wants more national titles and aims to take them by any means necessary. There’s something admirable in that after 44 years(!) behind the bench at three different schools.

But what we really need to talk about here is what a phenomenal, unthinkable accomplishment getting to 1,000 wins is, and will literally be forever. This seems to be almost “Gretzky’s career scoring totals”-level untouchable.

Over 44 seasons, York has coached in 1,704 games. That’s an average of 38.7 per year. But back when York started, teams didn’t play as many games as they do today, so in the era during which teams played 34 regular-season games plus however far they made it into the playoffs, the number is probably a lot higher; after all, York’s teams typically get pretty deep into the postseason (this year will be his 23rd NCAA appearances since the expansion of the schedule in 1979-80).

But given that, I would say that 38 (rounding up from last year’s average of 37.6) sounds about right for what most teams play these days. Last year North Dakota and Notre Dame played 42 apiece to lead the nation, and 14 more cleared 40. But there was a pretty wide band in the high 30s, and a few in the low 30s, mostly Ivy League schools.

So to win 1,000 over 44 seasons gives you about 22.7 per season, but 23.6 if you include only the years with 34-plus games played. Very, very few coaches will be able to sustain a win total that high every year for a decade, let alone three or more pretty much like clockwork. Let’s put it this way: York only has 10 seasons of sub-.500 hockey in his entire career, and none since 1996. Indeed, York’s teams average a record of 23.6 wins, 13.7 losses, and 2.9 ties in the “modern schedule” era of college hockey. That’s a .623 winning percentage.

How does that stack up to his peers? Again, it’s basically an untouchable record. To figure out just how outrageous the gap here truly is, I looked every coach currently in Division 1 and did the math to see just how far away everyone is, based on the average number of wins they compile in a 38-game schedule (again, that’s the modern NCAA average).

Some guys were closer to 1,000 than you’d have thought at first blush, so here are the 10 guys most likely to hit the millennium mark at the youngest ages: 

(Fun fact: at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are two coaches who, given their career success rates, would need to coach past their 200th birthday to match York. There are another 23 who would need to be at least a century old.)

Both Lucia and Pecknold could do it in relatively the same amount of time as York, in terms of their ages. A season or two separate them at this point, but the idea that Pecknold, who’s in his mid-40s, would coach another 27 years of hockey at this level seems outlandish to some extent. If you asked him whether he could see himself doing it that long — we’re talking another six-plus full recruiting cycles — one can’t imagine the answer would be, “Yes.”

Lucia being the closest, with a whopping 313 wins to go, should come as little surprise, and given his success for basically his entire career, plus the attraction that a school like Minnesota. With the Gophers, he is always going to have the opportunity to win 20-plus games a year, but can he do it for almost 14 more? You really have to wonder, because while he remains extremely competitive, there are many far greater pressures on him to continually perform than, say, York would ever face at BC. 

The one other guy I want to highlight here is Nate Leaman, who will reach 1,000 at the age of 85, nearly 42 seasons from now, according to the math. However, it’s only been in the last two or three seasons that he truly established himself as a coach capable of winning 20-plus like clockwork at a well-funded program Providence. That is to say he endured some tough years in the early goings with the Friars, and even more difficulties until his final two seasons at Union before that.

But he’s a hell of a coach and recruiter both, probably one of the three or four best in either area in college hockey, so as long as he wants the job, the rate at which he racks up wins is going to pick up considerably. But even if we assume that his winning percentage from the last three seasons (with an average of 23.4 wins per 38 games) is applied for the remainder of his career that only subtracts nine years from his “age at 1,000,” putting him at Berenson’s current age of 76. That’s still almost 33 more years of coaching.

York had the chance to become a head coach at the NCAA level at the age of just 26, an unheard of number in modern hockey. If someone were to have as much success as York has had at that age today, they could probably get there before they turned 70. But it’s never going to happen.

While it’s mathematically feasible that some coaches in college today could get to 1,000 wins, the odds that Jerry York will ever be met at that level, let alone surpassed, are basically nil.

A somewhat arbitrary ranking of teams which are pretty good in my opinion only (and just for right now but maybe for a little longer too?)

1. Quinnipiac (tied at Maine, tied RPI)

2. North Dakota (took three points from Colorado College)

3. St. Cloud (swept Western Michigan)

4. Boston College (won at UMass, tied UConn)

5. Providence (split a home-and-home with Lowell)

6. Boston University (swept a home-and-home with Maine)

7. UMass Lowell (split a home-and-home with Providence)

8. Michigan (beat the US Under 18 team in an exhibition)

9. Harvard (won at Colgate, won at Cornell)

10. Notre Dame (swept at UNH)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and also covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is here and his Twitter is here.