Rick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DIETlxquzY I believe Stuart even has his Bison colors on.

Bison Football, They're not smart enough or grown up enough or sophisticated enough to understand. Now that's a tag line that will stick with them for a while. Thank you Judge Herman. Anyone know how much a Billboard along I-94 would cost?

Me too. It would be nice if Mark Emmert, Bernard Franklin and the rest of the NCAA committee were right below me when I barf.

Maybe you could make up the difference. Most universities in the country can't even get this type of donation from their most successful alumni and Mr. Hamm is a gentleman who has no ties to the UND but still gave the university a boatload of money. The University of Oregon has Phil Knight and UND has Ralph Engelstad. There aren't anymore of those types around. But UND has been very fortunate to have guys like James Ray and Harold Hamm who because of the Aerospace and Oil Industries have decided to invest in these programs. This will give the University of North Dakota a chance to bring the Geology School to the level of the Aerospace School. Thanks to the generosity of people like Engelstad, Hamm & Ray, UND is blessed with world class facilities & programs that others can only dream about.

If you take the top 50, or even the top 100, I bet they wouldn't even know anything about a lot of the schools that are in the 150 to 200 range. That's what makes it very impressive that UND not only plays all these prestigious schools and are well known by them, but they also come to Grand Forks to play the Sioux. The closest other schools in the upper midwest (with the exception of the U of Minnesota) will come to getting schools like Harvard, Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Yale, Boston College, etc to come to their sports venues would be a fly-over at about 35,000 feet.

I didn't include those schools because they were either not in the same conference as UND, or they haven't played at UND or they are below UND in the rankings. What I was trying to highlite was the number of highly rated schools that are rivals and have played games at UND. Maybe I should have listed schools that are in the top 200 instead of the top 170. Then I could have included Montana and Montana State.

Looking at that list I was amazed at the number of highly rated schools that UND has as sports rivals. I only looked at the schools that were above UND's #170 ranking and I limited it to schools we've established as rivals for NCAA Division 1 National Championships or schools that are in the same conference as UND. I also limited it to schools that have played at UND. I wonder what other schools in the country would be able to top this list? There's probably only a handful. Here's what I found: #15 - Cornell #17 - Notre Dame #29 - Michigan #31 - Boston College #38 - UC Davis #41 - Wisconsin #51 - Boston University #68 - Minnesota #72 - Michigan State #83 - Denver University #89 - University of Miami - Oxford #120 - Michigan Tech We'll probably be able to include #165 - Idaho as a conference member in the near future also. Then, I also looked at other schools on the list that have played at UND. They include: #1 - Harvard #2 - Princeton #3 - Yale #10 - Dartmouth #15 - Cornell #56 - Ohio State University #106 - University of Kansas #156 - University of Maine

Family Friendly Safe for Work Inviting to all Fans Bikini Photos Well, that pretty much eliminates 2/3rds of the Ag College's football team. How about photos with a "wardrobe malfunction"?

I'm not interested in what you had to say about him. His frozen foot has no relevance to this conversation.

I wasn't aware that Kristo broke any law. Why do you mention him?

You have a in your post but it's a very true statement. Here’s an organization that’s run by elitist (fill in blank) like Miles Brandt (RIP), Bernard Franklin and Mark Emmert and the only check in place is that they answer to 100’s of other elitist (fill in blank). Seems like a recipe for success, doesn’t it? One of the very, very few who questioned the organizations motives was Charles Kupchella. People around these parts like to take shots at Kupchella but early on he saw through, and had to battle with, all the blindly led sheep that were enamored with the slick snake-oil salesman in Fargo and across North Dakota. He also saw, early on, that the NCAA was misguided in their quest to rid the world of social injustice by stripping away Native American’s identities and telling the University of North Dakota that they were a hostile and abusive campus. Kupchella was probably the only university president in history to win any sort of battle with the NCAA when they dropped the “hostile and abusive” claim. Kupchella probably leaned the same way as most university presidents, but he wasn't afraid to take on an injustice when he saw it. It will be interesting to see where (or if) the NCAA will stop in their unobstucted mission to lead the nation to its views of society.

One of them was most likely when Schobert notified them that he was rejecting the scholarship offers and the other preferred walk on from Wisconsin to take the preferred walk on from UND.

What's political in that statement? You must be reading something into it.

I guess the statement I take issue with is "but UND is not on the radar of anyone outside of NoDak or outside of college hockey circles" because those articles in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, etc, weren't printed just to catch the eye of hockey guys. A whole bunch of people read those articles that had no interest in hockey but, as a result of the articles, they found out where UND, Grand Forks and the state of North Dakota are.

I guess I can agree with that regarding football and the oly sports, but I can direct you to numerous articles written about UND hockey in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, La Times, Boston Globe, ESPN, Minneapolis Tribune, St Paul Pioneer Press, United Airlines In-Flight Magazine, etc that many "big town/big state" universities would love to have about their programs. When you make statements about the Sioux being small-time, I think you have to separate Sioux Hockey from the discussion. Now, if some of the things being floated out there with the Big Sky & WAC come about, all of UND's programs will get elevated to a level that the State of North Dakota hasn't seen before. Probably not to the level of Sioux Hockey, but it certainly is going to be ramped up several levels from where it was and far above what the Steam Yellow crowd is used to.

Yep, they needed to hire someone with a lot of experience just like the Gophers did when they hired Grant Potulny. Hey, at least Raboin wasn't a Community Organizer before he landed this gig.

Marilyn Hagerty....

You are kidding, right? Why would you ever want to elevate them up to the Big Sky?

I'm not sure what the definition of a "money pit" is but I'm wondering if quite a few sports couldn't be classified as money pits. Is every sport, other than men's hockey, a money pit? I believe football is a money pit for many universities. Do we have a balance sheet for UND football? Is it a money pit? I don't know if women's hockey is a money pit and I don't know if football is a money pit but I wouldn't throw that out as a fact unless I was going to provide some concrete numbers.

He's also a Canadian citizen.

Yes and Yes, plus 9 or 10 more FF's since and I agree with him that you make ignorant comments.

If you wanted a more apples to apples comparison, it should have been NDSU football to Fargo Force hockey. The Sioux play Michigan, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Wisconsin, Boston College, Boston U for D1 championships. NDSU played LeHigh, Jim Madison, Southern Georgia and Sam Houston State for theirs.

If you look at the video, Hak shakes Miller's hand at about the one minute mark when Drew Stafford is being interviewed.

The Summit didn't look nearly as attractive once the Big Sky approached UND. It's like being engaged to Phyllis Diller and then all of a sudden Mila Kunis says she'd like to marry you. While I'd like to believe that there were no back door shenanigans going on with the UND administration, I've talked to enough people to give me reason to question what was really happening. As with any far left liberal cause, they just keep at it until they wear people down and too much water gets passed under the bridge to turn it back. That's what's happened here, it's far past the time to get it turned back. There was way too much incompetence from the North Dakota delegation. Then, when you're dealing with elitist academics and you have an administration that would prefer to "scrub" the name from the university, there isn't much hope. Especially when your elected officials and Attorney General choose to surrender and bend over for the NCAA. We all know that politicians are liers and Joe Chapman showed us that university presidents aren't above lying. Some are just smarter liers than others. Joe turned out to be one of the dumber ones. It would really be nice to get them all on a lie detector to see who is telling the truth. I'm not going to just choose to fall into line with the academic leaders of our beloved university and blindly discard any red flags that have popped up over the last 4 years.

I know what they had to do contractually, that's not my point.