jimdahl

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.

As promised, the new RPI. I'll polish up the team details and hopefully PWR later this month. Then I should be able to put together some interesting comparisons.

SiouxSports.com usage tip -- the football page is probably a better place to look for a score; game threads tend to contain people who already know the score having such insightful discussions as how the wind affected our running game

This is where GVSU turns it over, right?

That's the second time UND has prevented a GVSU TD in "the wrong direction" with a red zone turnover. It's becoming harder to hang the current score differential on UND's missed points from turnovers.

Wow, that burns a lot of time. We really need a quick 3 and out (or a TO) to take advantage of those punting yards.

Well THAT wasn't the wind.

Yep, scoring on this drive is not optional if we want to win. We would still need to spend half-time figuring out how to prevent GVSU from scoring on every possession in the 3rd, but we have to score here first.

Ok, I'll grant you, that was awful

I'm sure the pass coming up super short and thus easy to pick off had nothing to do with the wind Seriously, is anyone still going to argue it's coincidence that GVSU scored on every possession in the 1st and us never; while in the 2nd they've punted and thrown an INT while we scored?

I disagree. I think the difference between that GVSU possession and the previous 3 is directly attributable to wind. I'm not saying UND hasn't made unnecessary mistakes, but the teams sure looked like they switched roles on GVSU's last possession. UND simply needs to show some offensive competence, now, and put up some points.

Other than the unfortunate fumble, that's not a bad thought, so far. Anyone who seriously thought that we were going to hold GVSU to 10 points like years past obviously wasn't paying attention to the UNO game. UND needs to burn some of this clock to reduce GVSU's scoring chances, so we can get more possessions with the wind than we give up. There's no reason, yet, to think we won't get the good field positions and be just as effective with the wind as GVSU has been. If that's the case, it will come down to who can get some points going the wrong way and who can get some big stops (e.g. we need something analagous to GVSU's TO/TD). On the other hand, if the game still looks like this half way into the 2nd, the bandwagon can officially unload (if it's possible for that happen more than it is already )

This isn't the UND defense of years past -- last week UNO scored on every possession except one until the INT in the 4th. With such a strong wind influencing the game, we just need to find a way to get some points on the board this quarter and hope to get some stops when the wind is against GVSU. That said, the coverage on that TD was horrible.

To entertain you for the next 10 minutes, the football page has all the pregame coverage I could find...

Yeah, you wouldn't know I'm highly trained in brand management, because I've really sucked at managing the SiouxSports.com brand. I've been meaning to do merchandise forever, but have always been hung up by not having a single official logo. I've been meaning to commission a logo for ages, but never have. So, I've created quite a few logoless sweatshirts and so forth for myself, but nothing for public consumption. Of course, the nice thing about owning the only SiouxSports.com merchandise myself is that when you see it, you know it's either me or Mrs. SiouxSports.com.

The way that works is that advertisers buy ad space associated with keywords, and their ads are displayed on sites that match those keywords. In this case, NDSU must have bought ads for display on pages about "North Dakota" or "North Dakota" & "University" or some such combination (or perhaps even "Sioux"). I personally think it's kind of funny, but since you all don't seem to, I do have some control (there's a facility for blocking "competitors" ads, so if Coke is displaying ads, and Pepsi bought adspace on all pages about cola, Coke doesn't end up displaying a Pepsi ad). Of course, having a thread titled "NDSU" on the front page is just going to make even more NDSU ads appear The whole thing is modestly experimental, hence its appearance on that single page. Don't worry, I refuse to have the site end up looking like this, rather I'm trying to see if I can fit in some relevant unobtrusive text ads.

Can Dartmouth stand for racism? Snicker... Though Sicatoka better watch out his cavalry nickname will come under attack, too.

I thought he was referring to UND voting against reclassifying the entire NCC to D-I, something UND (at least in hindsight) obviously should have supported.

Thomas: NCC will fold in summer 2008

The banner in the upper right is a non-paid advertisement for a charity I've followed for a few years, now. Ernie has run this program for about five years -- donations pay for low-grade U.S. military men and women travel home to see their families for the holidays, which they otherwise would not be able to afford. It has been certified as a non-profit. More background here. I know everyone is tight around the holidays; but if even 50 college hockey fans gave $10, that could reunite 1-2 soldiers (who are putting their lives on the line so we can worry about such trivial things as athletic nicknames and hockey scores, rather than attacks and invasions) with their families for the holidays. Your questions are probably answered in this FAQ. Thanks for your time. Jim

The changes to the RPI, while seemingly arbitrary, had two specific goals: 1) eliminate all the "negative" games 2) otherwise produce an ordering identical to that of the old formula Given #2, the change was obviously only superficial -- though the weightings seem to make even less sense, the result is the same. Frankly, the previous dropping of "negative" games only from conference tournaments was completely arbitrary (and hard to implement). Choosing the weighting to mimic the old result over a year or two is silly, but considering that RPI is 75% SOS, not ridiculously out of line. I do have the new RPI fully implemented (hopefully the above-linked page on this site will reflect it by the end of this weekend), and it humorously deviates wildly from the old formula early in the season (as there are currently about a dozen "negative" games despite there only being four by the end of last season), but it settles into the same result in the late season.

Post number 200,000 was on Nov. 18 by AZSIOUX. The discrepancy between post numbers and the post count on the front page is explained above.

A little more on jobs in N.D., and this company in particular: N.D. tries to lure workers back home And how G.F.'s job growth is finally back matching its regional peers post-flood: Job Growth: Equal among its peers With much more in-depth analysis on Mr. Tran's blog: More jobs = higher wages