jimdahl

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.

Agreed. The whole point of the runoff was to get a name to 50%. Now that they've abandoned that principle, why not just declare Fighting Hawks the winner, as it had a clear lead over the other two? What's the point of seeing how the Sundogs and Northstars votes get distributed across the remaining three, but not seeing how the Nodaks votes would get distributed across Roughriders and Fighting Hawks.

The problem is that it doesn't matter what they claim is the planned process anymore when they're obviously willing to modify the process based on how they feel about the result of the vote. They're going to have us all vote again, eyeball the numbers, and decide what to do then.

But what's the "right name"? The process really defines that, and changing the process can change the outcome.

I wonder if this will look much different than the poll of 5 on this site, given that sundogs and northstars barely registered in that one. Or does the changing of the rules mid-game and strength of Fighting Hawks in the first balloting change anyone's opinion?

Heard it here first Can't believe they broke their own rules to let the establishment favorite #3 vote getter in... I used to be among those defending the process.

Trying to explain differently, it's reasonable to guess that people on this site are the ones who most closely follow UND athletics, social media, etc..., so are more likely to jump on the late breaking Nodaks trend then a random alum in Florida who just got his ballot in his email and never heard any of that. But, we're all just guessing. We all agree that people who voted in this poll might not be representative of the 80,000 who got to vote, so we're trying to guess in what ways the real outcome might differ.

PWR doesn't even really exist yet -- as long as there are teams with undefined RPIs (which there are still about half a dozen), the PWR calculations aren't stable.

I think the hypothesis is that people on this site are far more aware than the general public of Nodaks' late push so Nodak would have risen more here than in the general public. We certainly saw posts in this thread where people said Nodaks wasn't their favorite, but they voted for it so as not to throw away their vote. I'm among those who wonder if the actual result could be noticeably different from this poll, particularly in the "bottom 3" which received almost no votes here showing more strength (again, because people here gravitated toward the perceived winners). It'll be interesting to see what the final result is.

I think a thing the "Teddy wasn't from ND" crowd is missing is that fans didn't latch onto Roughriders because of our own personal opinions about how connected Teddy was to ND. Rather, I like the idea of the state's namesake public university having a nickname that matches a state motto or slogan (e.g. the Wolverine State, the Badger State, the Gopher State). RR detractors have pointed out that ND isn't officially the Rough Rider State, but it is one of the nicknames associated with the state, listed on nd.gov, used in its highest award, highway signs, businesses, etc... So, trying to convince RR supporters that Teddy isn't associated with ND is tilting at windmills, proponents are latching on to the association that the state itself has promoted for decades. That's why Rough Riders came up as an early favorite and consistently polled near the top long before this formal process began.

Yeah, imagine a Brien-style serious cowboy face as a logo (I'm essentially picturing the Sioux head, but a cowboy). I think I could really like that. To be fair, that could also work for Nodaks.

Here's my take -- as I said at the beginning, we all agree that the polls here aren't representative. So, the game is try to figure out how the population of 80,000 voters differs from us. Anyone who bothers to register for an account on this forum is paying a lot more attention to UND athletics than the average eligible voter. So, I'll guess that the average voter would be less influenced than us by the debates and trends that have moved names up and down the last few months. So, I'll guess that the first round voting looks a lot more like the poll from the summer, which was our first reactions to the names: We've seen people here say that their first choice was North Stars / Fighting Hawks / Sundogs, but that they voted Nodaks or Roughriders so as not to waste their vote. I don't think that trend carries into the general population, so I think those three do better than they're doing in our exit poll. The question is does one of them rise up enough to take #1 or #2 (assuming a runoff). I would guess Nodaks doesn't do as well in the general population as it's doing here, again because the general population wasn't in on the debate that led to its recent surge. Instead, a neutral person looking at the ballot should have a reaction to Nodaks much more like most of us did back in July. The question is how many not-paying-attention alums saw some of the Herald's publicity push for Nodaks and latched onto it. Roughriders is a tricky one. I think North Dakotans in general have an initial positive reaction because of the association with the state and it has an advantage being the only nickname that's a person. But, while most of us brush off the Grand Forks high school angle as unimportant, I wonder if that's more of a factor in Grand Forks (I'm hypothesizing that the voting pool is more Grand Forks-centric than this forum). It seems like Nodaks should've picked up some ground, even among the general voting pool, so a Roughriders / Nodaks runoff still seems like the safest place to put your money. But, I wouldn't be shocked if Fighting Hawks (or one of the others) displaced one of them.

Only due to me being really slow. I had an interim name (just related to UND, not any of the five finalists) ready to go, but was trying to time it to coincide with some redesign work. When I still wasn't ready to go a year or so ago, I decided there was no point moving to interim name for just one year, so we're now officially waiting for a new nickname. But the broad principle is still the same -- I want the site to be recognizably associated with UND athletics, so we won't stick with Sioux for long once a new name is chosen. Four more years at the most

I've noticed a lot of predictions in other threads about what the voting tally will be (not who you want to win, but what you think will happen). Brad's hallway poll of student athletes probably isn't a representative sample. Even the people voting here certainly aren't representative of the 80,000 eligible. So, what do you think the outcome will be and why?