The last time these teams met, Miami snapped a then-unheard of seven-game winless streak in 2016.
RPI, which has not qualified for the NCAA Tournament since 2011, has seen its win total slip from 18 in 2021-22 to 14 the following season and 10 last year.
Historically the RedHawks have fared well against RPI, winning 8 of 10 all-time matchups including a 3-1 record at Cady Arena.
VFG takes a look at the upcoming series:
WHO: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Engineers (2-3-1) at Miami RedHawks (3-3-2).
WHERE: Cady Arena (3,049), Oxford, Ohio.
WHEN: Friday and Saturday — 7:05 p.m.
ALL-TIME SERIES: Miami leads, 8-2.
VIDEO STREAMING: NCHC.tv ($).
MIAMI RADIO STREAMING: Friday — MiamiRedHawks.com (Greg Waddell PxP, Drew Davis, color).
MIAMI RADIO: Saturday — WMOH-AM (1450), Hamilton, Ohio.
NOTES: This season started off well enough for Rensselaer, as the Engineers swept Canisius on the road, racking up 14 goals in the series.
Six days later, the Engineers tied Niagara, but the Purple Eagles edged RPI in overtime a night later, and Union swept the Engineers in the ECAC’s first in-conference set of 2024-25 last weekend.
So after a 2-0 start, RPI is winless in its last four.
Rensselaer has had no problem finding the net, averaging 4.5 goals per game.
Among its forwards, Latvian freshman Rainers Rullers is tied with sophomore Tyler Hotson for the team lead in points with seven apiece, and Rullers is tops on the Engineers with five goals.
Hotson scored 13 goals last season and already has three in 2024-25.
Fifth-year RPI senior Jake Gagnon didn’t dress once for the Engineers as a freshman but has recorded 16 and 14 points in the past two seasons, respectively, and he’s third on the team with six points (2-4-6).
Five more forwards on the opposite ends of the eligibility spectrum already have five points — freshmen Jagger Tapper and Felix Caron and grad seniors John Beaton and Jakob Lee.
Two defenseman also have five points: Senior William Gilson and junior Max Smolinski.
Gilson, an Alaska-Anchorage transfer who tallied 29 points the past two seasons, is 2-3-5, and Smolinski — son of 15-year NHL veteran Bryan Smolinski — has a goal and four assists and has notched double-digit point totals in each of his first two seasons with RPI.
Grad seniors Elliott McDermott and Arvils Bergmanis have also been solid contributors on the blue line in their careers, and sophomore Jimmy Goffredo as well as seniors Jack Agnew and Nick Strom have rounded out the defense corps.
RPI has allowed 35.5 shots per game, fifth-worst in the NCAA, so not surprisingly, the Engineers have surrendered 24 goals in six games.
Rensselaer is tied with St. Thomas, Mercyhurst and Colgate for the worst goals-against average clip in Division I at 4.0.
Fourth-year senior goalie Jack Watson has been between the pipes for 75 games with the Engineers and has a .902 save percentage in three games this season.
Watson has split time in net with Ferris State transfer and graduate senior Noah Giesbrecht, whose save percentage is just .880.
It seems like RPI has already seen a season’s worth of special teams goals: The Engineers are fourth in the NCAA with a 31.8 percent power play but tied for 53rd out of 58 on the penalty kill (71.0 percent).
Several Miami forwards were banged up last weekend, including super grad seniors Colby Ambrosio and Matt Choupani — the RedHawks top two points producers this far in 2024-25 — as well as center William Hallen.
Ambrosio and Choupani are both likely to play this weekend, but Hallen’s status is less clear. He left Friday’s game in the second period and did not play the remainder of the weekend.
The RedHawks lost to the Engineers, 9-1 in these teams’ first-ever meeting at RPI in 1984, but Miami won the next seven head-to-head contests before splitting on Jan. 2-3, 2016.
Two more sevens to throw out…the Friday loss that year snapped the RedHawks’ winning streak over Rensselaer at seven, and the subsequent Saturday win ended MU’s winless streak of seven games.
That victory also ignited a 10-4-1 Miami second-half run that propelled the RedHawks to fifth place in the NCHC, the last time MU has finished that high in the conference standings.
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