jimdahl

SchlossmanGF UND President Robert Kelley voted for Fighting Hawks in the last round, but said his No. 1 choice lost out early in the process. 11/18/15, 11:29 AM

#FightingHawksProud

It's been observed in each of the previous rounds that readers of this site are significantly more biased against Fighting Hawks than the voting population. It seems most likely that will continue to be true in this final round.

I've heard that they've had the Northstars logo ready to go since summer, so presumably they'll announce that at the same time as the Northstars bombshell.

Unfortunately, there are copyright/trademark problems with that. SiouxSports' lawyer has had some good conversations with UND licensing company's lawyer, in which the ground rules were generally agreed upon that using UND logos in a news capacity (e.g. in scoreboards, adjacent to stories) is acceptable, but putting UND's marks in the masthead (as if this were a UND site) is not. That's why I commissioned the less popular SiouxSports logo.

Yeah, typing "siouxsports.com" will definitely work for a long time, even after the primary URL changes.

Actually, Nodaks won the exit poll here in the round of 5, just slightly edging out Roughriders. But it is true that this forum is useless for judging the popularity of Fighting Hawks among actual voters. The Hawk names have never done as well here as in the general public -- I think because they've been so beaten up in discussions as being what all transitioning schools do, whereas Fighting Hawks actually gives off a pretty good first impression to someone who hasn't spent months debating it.

Agreed, I actually updated my post a bit after you managed to quote it because I thought it had the wrong connotation. I think we're choosing from a worse field of nicknames than we could have. I was just trying to say that I'll continue to follow and support UND, which is not a sentiment everyone here professes to share.

Yeah, I'd be good with that, too. However, I'm personally pretty biased toward mascots that are people, so would have happily taken a field of plainsmen, reapers, sodbusters, aviators, roughriders, etc... over the field we got. But, not surprisingly, not everyone seems to share my preference; so, I'll support the choice of the people.

Far too late for such speculation, but in a head-to-head I think I could have gone for a blatantly American eagle instead of a hawk. Tap into a pro-USA, state flag, etc... sentiment. An "America's team" sort of thing, but without stating it quite so blatantly as the Cowboys. Stupid question -- does any other major university do that? I mean something resembling a federal agency or state logo eagle, not just an "eagle"-based nickname (though I guess that would be interesting to know, too).

This won't be popular... I personally think the University is for the students and (at least in hindsight) wouldn't be particularly bothered if only students had been allowed to choose the new nickname; alums and friends could have kept following the teams or moved on as they saw fit, but our time for being in charge is in the past. Of course, that doesn't fit with the economic reality of schools needing to engage friends and alums for tickets and donations, so instead we have a voting pool in which current students are actually greatly outnumbered by other stakeholders. It will be hard to complain if the students really do have a different preference than the rest of the constituents, but are sufficiently more engaged such that they manage to propel it to victory.

It does keep an eye on what address your device is coming from, so if it's moving between addresses (or if multiple logins are occurring from a single address) it might make you logon again.

Click the little dot or star to the left of the topic instead of the topic title (will only be there for topics that you've read some posts, but have unread posts).

I have wondered if the vote would have differed if the choices had been Hawks and Fighting Nodaks.

It's actually a pretty good nickname, generates a positive first reaction as a team name, sounds fierce, can't offend anyone, has obvious logo possibilities, etc... which is why dozens of other schools have gone that route. It's a completely safe choice. But, some fans accustomed to the uniqueness and edginess of Fighting Sioux were hoping UND might be able to recapture a little of that magic (where the nickname itself was inspiring and voted as unique and cool). Hawks isn't "so bad", it's actually so good that dozens of schools have adopted it, so it's just not unique.

Looks like the number of people participating in the vote actually went up, not what most of us expected.

I only realized it when I was investigating and you hover over the link, only part of it changes color.

When you look at the user's feed and it says something like "Cratter has a post in the topic Scheduled downtime/maintenance", there are actually two links. "post in a topic" is a link directly to your post, "Scheduled downtime/maintenance" is a link to the front of the thread.

Interesting how much more lobbying there is on this forum this week than during the last vote. I guess its a reaction to the anti-Hawks crowd being surprised by its strong showing in the first round.

I'm still trying to decide whether there should be any coordination between redesign and nickname change. Of course I'm also just really bad at releasing new stuff (that's what you get for free); but running the new one in parallel with this for the last few months has helped me improve the new one a lot. So, it'll happen when it happens

It seems there's a lifetime limit on how much space worth of images you can upload, which I guess makes sense. I increased it a lot.

Try again, I changed a setting related to upload limits that might help. I'm still trying to figure out all the new settings on this software upgrade.

What will UND do if the top vote gets under 50%, but the bottom two are too close?

If your hypothesis is that the only people who changed their mind to Nodaks were people who also voted on this forum, it can't be proven either way but doesn't seem particularly likely to me. But, I don't think the swing was nearly as pronounced in the general public (which was less exposed to the social media push for it than the average forum reader), which is why Nodaks polled much better here than in the real vote.

Nodaks jumped from getting 14% in the poll of readers of this forum in July to 44% in the exit poll last week. It's clearly a named that gained momentum after lukewarm initial impressions.