jimdahl

Following up on the discussions in the NCAA bans all tournament play in S.C. thread, will anyone be surprised when the NCAA bans tournaments in cities with hostile and abusive professional teams? I'd love to see D.C.'s reaction to no more basketball tournaments at the Verizon Center (n

It's a perfectly logical extension of this to guess that tournaments will eventually be banned from North Dakota for the state's abuse of Indian imagery and unapproved use of an Indian name in the state name. Following that hypothetical example makes it clear that the NCAA is an abusive monopoly. This athletics governance body can perform any social engineering they want by imposing arbitrary moral, legal, and other requirements on institutions, cities, and states, if they want to participate fully in the NCAA. No legitimate business facing any competition would ever dare behave in such a manner, but having no actual competition yet being completely unregulated has emboldened the NCAA to reach far beyond the organization's mission and try to reshape the world to fit their ivory tower notions of political correctness. In response to some opponents' glee at the NCAA punishing UND, many Sioux fans have joked that fans of other schools should be more sympathetic because PETA may approach the NCAA next. It's time to stop laughing. This action shows that a social engineering NCAA is willing to punish schools to try to sway other entities on other issues. Gopher fans should worry that the NCAA might not like Minnesota's minimum wage laws, and Bison fans should be scared that the NCAA may not like Fargo's treatment of gay marriage. I don't post much in this forum because I'm somewhat torn as to whether UND should use the Sioux nickname. However, I have no doubt that the NCAA abusing its monopoly to try to reengineer society is a scary thing for everyone.

UNI program draws a large crop of talent - Des Moines Register UNI gridders trying to get up to speed - Waterloo Cedar-Falls Courier

That's what strikes me most about this story -- how accurately can we really predict how good a kid will play college hockey before he's even played a couple years at a high school age? Another interesting recruiting spin that occurred to me reading the USCHO thread is that when recruiting gets pushed so much earlier, factors like who you were a fan of growing up or who your parents know become a much bigger deal. Danny's ties to UND were obviously instrumental in this decision. Unrelated, I love this quote from that thread: Fans of other teams think the amount of discussion of their players on this message board is a useful barometer of quality. Excellent.

No doubt anonymity emboldens people to say things they wouldn't in person, but what they say is still often worth considering. Radio hosts' personal accountability, while noble, discourages them from risking harming their relationships with other stakeholders. However, most sports radio shows do rely heavily on the same emboldened anonymity, encouraging "know-it-alls" to call in and spout off without definitive identity verification (I'm unfamiliar with "Tim & Swygg", so am not commenting specifically on their show). On this medium, anonymity actually increases the expertise in the discussion. Players, coaches, staff, media, and their friends and families come to participate in the Sioux fan community and share news and opinions without being hassled or having to reveal precisely who they or their contacts are. It's the same "anonymous source" concept traditional media always relied on to get inside information, but with the additional ability to instantly publish information while being truly anonymous (not even known to an editor or reporter). That freedom certainly does dramatically reduce reliability compared to edited media, but astute readers can easily compensate for that. I personally do put my name on what I write and you all know where to find me. However, I understand that others have reasons they can't always do that, and appreciate the contributions from those who wouldn't be able to contribute if they had to attach their identity.

If this has been talked about elsewhere, I missed it: I don't love the slogan. I do like the beginning of the commercial with "Fight on Sioux" and the closeups of the player putting on his equipment. The 10 sec or so of highlights didn't necessarily strike me as the most visually impressive highlights, but I never mind watching the boys score.

I'm always kind of amused when professional sports discussers mock fans for daring to have sports discussions not sanctioned by them. Anyone can post a thought here, and anyone who disagrees can engage the original poster and any other interested parties in an ongoing discussion. Reading a post here and then criticizing it on a moderated radio show, to which the poster can't reply, is rather timid. Bear in mind an individual's personal stake in discussion mediums whenever they deride one (e.g. paid talent on radio chat show warns listeners against chatting on internet, or proprietor of a web discussion board makes fun of radio show ). Also keep in mind, despite what they may say, they're reading too...

I know there was some talk of UND's toughest scheduled opponent, UNI, in the thread announcing their addition to the schedule, but as the season draws near it seems worth having a UNI analysis thread. Former USC receiver Lewis lands at Northern Iowa - ESPN.com UNI football poised to continue successful run - Marshalltown Times-Republican UNI fourth in preseason poll - Waterloo Cedar-Falls Courier

I think there are people who, for a variety of reasons, wish UND would stay D-II. I was specifically trying to restrict the following comment to that subgroup: they're optimistically misinterpreting Kupchella's reticence as an indiciation that UND will try to back off the reclassification because it aligns with their desired outcome, not because it actually seems most likely.

I think it is an exit strategy, but not in the way hoped for by those who desperately want UND stay D-II. I think Kupchella is very risk averse about committing to big new athletics expenses but the athletics and alumni leaders have assured him the money will be there. I think they got to announce the reclassification, with the completion of the process contingent on using the two years to "show him the money". If that's the case, I have a good deal of confidence that they correctly estimated their ability to raise the additional funds and it would take an unexpected catastrophic event to cause UND to step back.

I wouldn't mind one more road trip to Florence, Ala., before we go NCAA Division I Non-Bowl Eligible But Still Important Football Championship Subdivision (DI-NBEBSIFCS)

I knew this was in the works, but what a pathetic attempt by I-AA to pretend it's not a lower division than I-A. It would've been nice and easy to explain to people that we were I-AA, but now we're supposed to say we're in the Football Championship Subdivision? Ugh.

A hard-to-come-by $2 million Lots of talk of the SUs budgets, for those of us who clamor for such info:

I got a chuckle out of this column in the Forum: Readers, beware of blogs

No, no, I'm not saying that you changed the way you login -- there was definitely a big server change in the last couple weeks that is undoubtedly the cause. What I was speculating was that the way you log in might be slightly different from the way other people do such that the new configuration of the new server is giving you a problem that it isn't necessarily giving to other people (or me). One big thing to watch, if the problem is as I described above (I know, a lot of techno-speak) is to see if the hostname part of the address bar changes between when you are logged in and when you aren't. e.g., if when you're successfully logged in you're on "www.siouxsports.com", but when it logs you out you're at "siouxsports.com", that would be interesting.

Hmmm... this happening to anyone else? One thing that comes to mind is that the cookies that keep track of your login are domain-name specific, that is, uscho.com couldn't read the cookies set by siouxsports.com. One possibility is that you're accessing the site from an alternative name such as http://www.siouxsports.com or http://siouxhockey.com, but then something you click is directing you to http://siouxsports.com, at which time siouxsports.com couldn't read the cookie.

I didn't see this mentioned earlier:

I've yet to see a single person subjected to moderation and think it was fairly, consistently, and judiciously applied to him. However, I'm always happy to discuss such concerns (after the link is the place, not here). That's my preference. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; some people like it, some don't On the subject of which, we're straying a little from "Kessel returning to the 'U'?"...

Even if they cap athletic department donations, what would they do to prevent an REA-like situation where the school plays a sport in a privately funded and owned building? How do they stop UND from playing in REA without stopping Minnesota from playing in the Metrodome (yes, I know, they're getting a new stadium)? How do they plan on enforcing a cap against private institutions -- no post-season tournaments on campuses that accepted too large a donation? I don't see how this possibly has legs. The NCAA is blustering again about athletics being too big a business, but this avenue of attack is untenable.

Some year-old information on the history of the program: UND Football History Including such fun facts as our 13-25 record vs. UNI in meetings from 1936-1978 UND Football in the postseason Demonstrates recent successes in D-II I'm sure, you know that UNI was a long-time member of the NCC. I can't help much with an outlook for this year, because I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it myself, yet.

Dude, do you have ANYTHING to contribute that's not smack? Really, what do you think that post added to the discourse? UND is going to broaden its recruiting area as it moves to D-I -- Nebraska and Montana are both interesting recruiting areas. Far easier to attract a kid from Nebraska to college in North Dakota than a kid from Texas or Florida. Nebraska has a good football tradition, there are a lot more kids worthy of playing I-AA ball in Nebraska than end up at the Huskers.

No topic has been banned for discussion. I'm asking people to make an effort to using threading to keep topics organized, because I think that helps keep the board more accessible to newer guests / those who don't visit as many times per day. A lot of people might be interested in UND D-I recruiting, conference, scheduling, etc... discussions, but if every thread with such titles actually turns into Bison / SDSU fans pontificating about UND's 2008 budget, those guests will perceive this as just another smack-filled message board and quit reading.

I don't want one or two anti-UND posters to keep spamming every thread about D-I with their speculation that UND is going to have budget problems. It's a very legit discussion. There's a thread dedicated to it. It will be a peripheral topic in other threads as relevant. I don't want to see it in every thread about recruiting, conferences, scheduling, and the other myriad topics related to our move to D-I. I honestly believe that one or two guests are posting here simply out of hatred for UND and with the single agenda of disrupting discussion about UND's reclassification with anti-UND propaganda. I think that agenda has been pursued by hijacking discussions about D-I into budget discussions. Guests who weren't doing that or don't have that agenda need not worry and should carry on as they have been; for any that were doing that, this is the warning shot across the bow.

Discussion / criticism of why I made this thread here. I'll do my best to participate.

Yes, it's a legit topic, that's why I even created this thread entirely dedicated to it! However, a couple anti-UND posters were trying to change the topic of almost every other thread (e.g. discussion of UNO) to their grave concerns about UND's budget, making it hard to hold other discussions. That is almost the textbook definition of spam. The same NDSU fan who hijacked that thread with his concern about UND's budget also raised hockey in the same post (supposedly because of his concern about hockey's impact on the budget). I think both were out of place in that thread, but if you think the transition to the former was ok, you certainly have to accept the latter (a discussion of the effect of UND's hockey on budgets, raised by the Bison fan, can't really be had without discussing the success of UND hockey!)