jimdahl

While the Mid-Continent Conference is close to piecing together its expansion puzzle, Southern Utah University is trying to figure out ...

Fargo Forum - Vague details hard to believe Gee, you think?

Digging into Divsion I

Due to popular demand, here is an official thread for SDSU/NDSU fans to congregate and discuss their mutual concerns over UND's future athletic budgets. Sioux fans' responses about the 'SUs secret deficits should also occur here. Spam other threads with it at your own peril.

Anyone who read the title of this thread and came hoping to learn about about UNO's study would be sorely disappointed. Bison / SDSU fans: You're welcome on this board to discuss UND's transition, but stop spamming every thread with your heartfelt concerns about UND's budget.

This is really getting afield of the topic "D-I move worth it" and becoming about the people posting. Let's move back toward the former. To hopefully help aid in such, I will note that because aff specifically requested it -- I see no indication that aff and 89rabbit are the same poster. A technically savvy person's ability to obfuscate such does exceed my ability to detect it, but usually such obfuscation attempts are themselves detectable. It wouldn't be particularly shocking for two individuals with similar outlooks (SDSU boosters, predisposed to question UND) and primary sources of information (the message boards cited above) to frequently produce similar posts.

Please don't copy posts vebatim from other web sites, we consider them to be the intellectual property of the original author and the web site. Discussions taking place on other sites are probably best completed on the other site. If they contain a topic interest to the UND community, you can provide a link to the remote article or raise a similar discussion here.

This isn't necessarily indicative of a preference by the board for every-man-for-himself institutional autonomy. Potts' voluntary departure removes a personal conflict that may have actually thwarted resolution of the question. The best thing that could come from this is the NDSBoHE clearly defining the role for the chancellor and hiring a replacement with clear expectations on all sides of what his authority will be. The more likely outcome is, unfortunately, a dramatic weakening of central authority and a renewal of zero-sum competition between N.D.'s higher ed institutions. I hope even the Chapman idolators realize the latter wouldn't be good for anyone.

Post #3 is just nonsense, I think Siouxnami must be a little crazy...

I read that as meaning REA. Not in the usual Gopher-fan-conspiracy sense (secret explosives will detonate upon a new name being christened), but in that the significant gift (a.k.a. arena) contains thousands of images and references tied to the name. In that sense, it hangs in the balance, because to avoid NCAA restrictions we would need to quit using REA or someone would have to pay for millions of dollars of modifications.

Moving or not isn't really Rick's decision (unless Rick is a pseudonym for Dr. K) I'd estimate about a third of the fans here think UND shouldn't be reclassifying. It's not my decision either, but I share his apprehension about shooting for MidCon (as I did when NDSU was reclassifying). One potentially mitigating change is that instead of moving alone, there are now at least 3 former NCC schools in play, which is a lot closer to the "move the top of the NCC" model a lot of us hoped for a few years ago. Playing old rivals NDSU/SDSU/USD(?) but replacing Augustana with the likes of Oral Roberts is a lot more attractive than replacing traditional opponents NDSU/SDSU with the likes of Oral Roberts. Disclaimer-- I pick on Oral Roberts despite them being a good, well-known school, because they are distinctly not a traditional opponent of UND so would have little mindshare among Sioux fans. I have no doubt they would feel the same way about us.

You were just supposed to look at the picture.

There's this crappy one, that may help depending what you need. I really should rescan those with post-Y2K technology...

Fighting Sioux merchandise instantly gives wanna-be gangstas that "hostile & abusive" cred they usually work so hard to achieve. We should create a special hostile & abusive product line and pursue rapper product placement, it could pay for the transition and the lawsuit.

Gary is visiting every Sioux name supporter, one by one, and dropping off a flickertail. You're lucky they didn't go with the original plan of sending a "sundog" to each of us.

I certainly agree, in principle, that the intentional misspelling of names in a disrespectful way is usually a sign of a specious argument. However, team releases (cited above), major fan sites (e.g. d3football.com, d2football.com, and d1afootball.com), and occasional mainstream media articles use Arabic numerals, so those markings clearly aren't to signify disrespect such as when a Bison fan writes "UND Sue". Ralph is correct that the official NCAA nomenclature is certainly Roman numerals, but I personally don't see that D2 as colloquial shorthand is offensive or even disrespectful; rather, I think it's like writing NoDak instead of North Dakota. I personally tend to write "D-II", but I also think attacking someone for writing 1-AA (as happened in this thread) is in the same family as jumping on message board spelling mistakes.

To qualify for a basketball autobid a conference needs: So, a new D-I conference (such as a new NCC) could get an autobid after 8 years of 7 members being fully D-I, assuming you managed to convince 6 of those teams to play together for the preceding 5 years. Intentionally punitive. The only way we're seeing new conference autobids is if a mega-conference (12 stable teams for 5 years) split in half and then each half took on a new member. Random thoughts on the potential expansion... Due to the incestuous strength-of-schedule component of RPI, an expansion of the field (more likely to 80 than 128) would mostly ensure that ACC, Big Ten, and the like sent over half their conference; bottom-tier conferences would, for the most part, still just send their one autobid. Interestingly, some of the mid-majors are starting to refuse the bodybag "guarantee" games that have pumped up the big conferences' RPIs, eroding the definitive two tiers that basketball has had for so long. Big conferences may see this as a defense against that, but it could actually shift the balance of at-large invites even more toward mid-majors if they successfully claim large amounts of the 30-50 RPI rankings through a combination of increasing parity and more insular schedules.

I didn't believe NDSU had a secret conference affiliation lined up when Bison fans were preaching it, and I don't believe UND does now. It's pretty obvious what's happening -- UND officials are asking potential conferences if they'd be interested in UND and are getting positive responses (just as NDSU did). That's encouraging UND officials to speak optimistically about the likelihood of finding a conference (just as NDSU's did). From what I'm hearing, though, UND officials learned something watching NDSU and are being a little more cautious and most fans are being a little more temperate in our expectations. I do agree with star2city, though, that Kupchella wouldn't allow the move if he didn't sincerely believe a conference could be found in the medium term (near the end of the transition?) That doesn't guarantee he's right, and it's a far cry from a secret deal all lined up.

I don't get what people are upset about, it seemed about right to me. Of course the bottom of D-I now looks like D-II used to. That's precisely why we're reclassifying, because all of our peers that used to be D-II are now D-IAA. We either had to reclassify to stay with our peers or not reclassify and become peers with Crookston. Of course the reclassification has both pros AND cons. I hope the school and its supporters don't start trying to pretend those cons don't exist now that the decision has been made; rather we need to continue to carefully consider, weigh, and mitigate them to ensure the best transition.

Jeff-Jeff made an impact on Sioux

Well, Ralph can set whatever rules he wants for his message board, including demanding adherence to the NCAA's deliberate use of Roman Numerals. However, I declare SiouxSports.com to be a Hindu-Arabic numeral friendly site. We hereby officially recognize I to be exactly the same number as 1. Write Division 1, or Division I, no matter to us.

Who knows what UND will do in two years if your hypothetical scenario comes about. By then UND may have decided it can't afford D-I, or may have been accepted to Big Sky. Things change -- keep in mind that NDSU officials promised the faithful a conference within a year and a half of their announcement or that they'd be looking for new jobs. Having listened to the press conference and paid close attention to what UND has been saying the last few months, however, it sounds like they are pretty reasonable about conference affiliation expectations. In fact, in response to a question about what they learned from watching NDSU, they talked about learning how hard they'd have to work to find a conference. My best guess is that they're going into this thinking your scenario quite likely, so hopefully they're prepared to deal with it.

Just listened to the Press Conference Audio. I don't quite have the time to summarize it more thoroughly, but you can listen to it. Rest assured the following questions were asked/answered: Why now when the school didn't want to move 5 years ago? Why the extra year instead of exploratory now? The general answers to the first two were: funding / external committments. When asked about conference affiliation he said we wouldn't be moving if we didn't think we'd be able to find a conference (but no one promised that we'd have a conference a year and a half from now or he better be looking for a new job )

Haven't seen this elsewhere here, but it fits in this thread anyway -- SC Times NCC, NSIC to discuss a merger

I'm with IowaBison for all the reasons Bob listed here. Announcing an exploratory year for a year from now would only cause harm (in recruiting, scheduling, and conference-hunting). Unless we spent that year trying to convince partners to jump with us (as did NDSU), it would be a complete waste of another unnecessary year to the transition process. If we want to take another year to explore what I-AA would be like before committing, that's precisely what the exploratory year is for!