jimdahl

Good question. Since they are NCAA games, I would expect updates. I won't know for sure until late Thursday night / Friday morning when the day's games are posted.

The oddest thing to me about this recurring "Force of the North" conspiracy theory is that people seem to believe that if the name is changed, it's going to occur in the dark of night by athletic department fiat. If UND reaches the point where they decide to change the name, they will definitely engage students, staff, faculty, and alums in choosing a new name, thereby giving them a stake in the new name. To do anything else would be catastrophically idiotic from the perspective of public relations and maintaining good will.

Since it's made by XOS Tech, my guess is it will look a lot like GoBison.com or GopherSports.com.

Judging from the message boards and media response, it seems very few fans actually support this decision. I would urge sympathetic Minnesota grads to take the time to write a letter (a real letter carries much more weight than an email) to Maturi and this advisory committee simply noting such. They are in these positions to represent our interests as stakeholders, and if the fans overwhelmingly want to see North Dakota on the schedule, those opinions could actually affect them. As a Minnesota alum and former non-hockey Gopher season ticket holder, I certainly intend to write such letters.

Foss, Bakken honored by state sports association Sioux Sports writers emeritus honored by the the North Dakota Associated Press Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame:

Except I'm already on record in favor the warlawsuit (and am, somewhat obviously, a big supporter of the Sioux and the nickname) . The reason I jumped into this fray is because I thought it an important point when Sultan noted that there are harmful externalities other than the NCAA's rule. Defeating the policy in the courts, based on improper procedure in its passage, may provide a reprieve against the tournament sanctions. However, it may not provide the needed relief from opponent or conference boycotts. That's not a heretical thing to say, instead I think it's something we need to be thinking about, especially as we begin the transition to Division I. I still think the best outcome for all parties would be to work with the tribes to get their approval, which would satisfy Sioux fans, the NCAA, and most nickname opponents (again, I know if it were easy, we would have already done it). Any other outcome is going to be painful and leave a lot of people unhappy.

That's precisely the concern I expressed up in #1504, echoed and expounded upon by mksioux in #1513. Would winning the lawsuit completely undo the damage of the NCAA having labeled UND as "hostile and abusive"? Many of us are concerned about the harm of the NCAA's rule that would prevent our playoff-bound teams from hosting games. That's the harm the lawsuit seeks to ameliorate. However, other PC bodies and institutions are likely to follow the NCAA's lead. Having Wisconsin and Minnesota refuse to schedule UND would do us serious harm as we transition to D-I. Having the UND-haters or name-change activists use the "hostile and abusive" label to plant seeds of doubt in even just one or two Presidents of potential conferences would do UND massive harm. We're entering a period where we're going to be seeking approval and favors from school presidents, ADs, other governing bodies, and the NCAA itself. We need the "hostile and abusive" label and stigma removed from UND, not just the post-season restrictions.

I've said it before -- keeping the name if we remain on the NCAA's "hostile and abusive" list is insanity. I don't think the NCAA was right in creating the rule, but I also don't think we should cut off our noses to spite our faces. Standing on principle if it disadvantages our athletes, in the playoffs and in scheduling situations like this, just doesn't make sense to me. I know a lot of Sioux fans are hoping the lawsuit is the solution; it may be, though I worry that it may not make problems like this go away. The one graceful way out would be some sort of agreement that creates NCAA-recognized tribal approval (which would placate the Minnesotas and Wisconsins we desperately need to play). However, if that were easy, UND would have done it by now. One way or another, I think we need to get ourselves off the "hostile and abusive" list early in our D-I transition.

Huh, the little red shirt seems to mean that you're currently online. I haven't seen the green one yet.

I made a moderately large upgrade to the forum software on Monday night. One intentional change to the appearance is that I tightened up the "padding" (white-space) a little bit so more forums and topics should fit on a single page than before. The upgrade did involve a complete redesign of the "skin" (appearance of the board), so other aspects of the spacing and colors might not be quite right yet. Report any anomalies here.

Me too! The old Whitey's was really my place. Ended many an evening with a burger basket and a few beers. I just found my Premo night pint glass this weekend!

Ok, I added a "non-collegiate sports" subforum to Community. We'll see how that goes. I'll continue to ponder basketball, as well. The reason that's not quite as automatic is that I would make it a main, front-page forum, which changes the layout of the front-page "real estate". It is a good idea, though. There's enough talk about basketball, now, that having it's own forum would make it easier to create separate threads for each topic, which may stimulate additional discussion.

This should give high school sports a little room to stretch out. By having a dedicated subforum for regional high school sports, it should be easier to spread discussions over multiple threads instead of having one giant 100 page thread.

An interesting thought. My first reaction was to envision an "other regional sports" forum, which could include high school sports. A benefit to giving those topics their own forum is that they could become useful, threaded conversations. Another problem with the current arrangement is that those topics are so active, they will dominate whatever forum they're in. Having them dominate the community forum has been somewhat inconvenient for me, in that I'm not particularly interested in them, but am interested in the rest of the community topics. I always hesitate to create a new top-level forum. The current 8 are generally visible on most screen sizes. Creating a "regional sports" or "high school sports" or whatever we call it as a subforum of community would solve your problem of wanting those discussions broken out into threads without taking up any more "front page" real estate. Others thoughts?

Drop the politics. Thanks.

I think you're all taking this guy a little too seriously. His 55 posts in about a week have been "Fire hakstol", "the Sioux football team is done" (continuously throughout the GVSU game thread, until we actually started scoring, when he mysteriously disappeared), and "we'll get swept by Tech". Proud Sioux, indeed? My intent is for this to be my last reply to this thread. Hopefully it will fall to the level of attention it deserves and drop quickly out of sight.

I think mod3 was correct to close the initial thread in the hockey forum as a troll and I'm happy to discuss why. As others have stated, it was a post completely devoid of any insight of value about the Sioux hockey team. Rather, it was simply an attempt to taunt the fans on this board about which threads were most recently posted in (a bizarre taunt on a forum with hundreds of posts that day). That, combined with it being your first post, combined with your intentional misspelling of Sioux as a final juvenile attempt at a dig on Sioux fans, painted your post quite clearly as a troll whose sole purpose was to "stir the pot". If you've been reading for years, as you claim, you know that threads aren't just closed because we don't like what they say or because someone says something "anti-Sioux". If you're really interested in discussing Sioux athletics, reread how the hundreds of other non-Sioux fans manage to participate in discussions without getting their threads locked, and try following their example (learning to spell Sioux would probably extend your intial welcome dramatically). If you're really just here to taunt, kindly go away.

I hadn't heard of that company. It looks like you can subscribe using the email address "<your 10-digit number>@message.alltel.com". I can add that as one of the default choices, so you just have to enter your phone number, but for now you can do it using the email address.

You don't seem to get it. Let me give it a try. This is a discussion about UND's men's basketball team, nothing whatsoever to do with WSU, yet you pop into the middle of this thread with irrelevant smack about how great you think WSU's team is. That's trolling, and it's not allowed because it impairs our ability to actually discuss UND, the point of the forum. If you honestly want to discuss UND's teams at any level beyond smack taunting, you're welcome to. If you just like hanging out with UND fans and want to discuss WSU with them, start a new thread titled "WSU basketball" and interested people can participate. However, you can't keep turning every thread on a UND message board into how great you think WSU is.

As promised, the new PWR. At this point, I think the RPI and PWR duplicate precisely what the NCAA will use in its selection criteria. Though I'll finish cleaning up the RPI/PWR details screens and help pages soon, the numbers on the PWR team details screens should be correct already.

From: http://siouxsports.com/football/nickel.htm Both games counted in '45 because both were regular season, neither of the playoff games in the 90s did (agreed upon before the game). Your wikipedia page seems to give 1980 to NDSU, whereas my page above gives it to UND 38-20. That's probably the difference between 35-30 and 34-31.

Will North Dakota's domination of "America's Next Top Model" continue? Fargoan vies for 'Top'

I agree that the number of dropped games should decline steadily. However, that will only benefit those teams whose RPIs have dropped low enough for those games to begin "helping", I guess providing some modest stabilization? Also keep in mind the "RPI contribution" of each game changes throughout the season as the opponent wins and loses additional games. Ugh. Much like PWR has always been, RPI isn't really defined anymore until the last game finishes, because you don't decide which games to drop until then. Not coincidentally, the new weightings were picked precisely to minimize the number of such games at the end of the last two seasons to hopefully minimize that effect. Not bothering to drop any until the end, if that's what the rpihockey guys are doing, may be sensible. If I didn't worry about it now, I'd never get it finished by March

No offense taken, they have a good site that has done a good job of calculating rankings for many years -- definitely the best source for a comparison of ordinal rankings across a broad set of interesting ranking schemes. Where the SiouxSports.com ranking pages differ is that I attempt to show significant additional detail behind just the "important" ratings (primarily RPI/PWR which are used to seed the NCAA tournament, though I also calculate KRACH which many college hockey fans consider to produce "the best" objective ranking). Each site is useful in a way the other isn't so I would certainly expect people to develop preferences based on what information they're seeking. As a somewhat unimportant caveat, because they undoubtedly just haven't implemented it yet nor bothered to note it on the page, I don't think those RPI ratings are right. They seem to be using the new RPI weightings of .25/.21/.54, but not dropping games which hurt a team's RPI, as also changed this year. See all the footnotes on the above-linked RPI for examples of such games. On the other hand, they do seem to be a step ahead of me in not considering TUC until 10 TUC contests, but that's hardly surprising Soon, soon...

Sorry for my delay in responding -- NCAA games only, apparently. This exhibition game never even showed up on the wire as occurring.