jimdahl

As an A-10 alum (it's important to throw out useless credentials when speculating wildly), the school most frequently mentioned in the last expansion was BU. Mass has rumbled wanting to go D-I football, but I'd be somewhat surprised to see them leave otherwise. Though the Big East split would certainly echo through the A-10, keep in mind that we're currently at 14 so wouldn't necessarily need to replace two lost schools immediately. Only because of recent underperformance in the A10 and overachieving by UW-Milwaukee could Horizon look close to A10. Atlantic 10 has 20 years of consistent top-tier tradition. Given that, the reason top Horizon schools would want to jump to A10 is to gain stronger conference opponents. Just look at how GW got robbed in this year's tournament seeding to realize why...

Q&A with Pittsburgh sportswriter Bob Grove:

I agree. That's personal smack, pure and simple. People who repeatedly make such posts or whose posts are primarily of that nature shouldn't be allowed to continue to post.

Brown eyes another title

In reviewing the last couple pages of the 2 legitimate threads that were closed, I see what the moderators were thinking and don't see it as quite so one-sided. Neither thread had really been about Sioux hockey for a while, but had devolved into Sioux fans bashing the Gophers. It's not stunning that Gopher fans retaliated. I think in the regular season such things quickly get drown out by other legitimate things to talk about. In the off-season, they seem to just hang around until they get out of control. I'm not sure interfering before they're out of control is what I want to do, either. I know a lot other team-specific sites quickly ban anyone who doesn't tow the party line (e.g. daring to say something negative about the "home" team). While that can keep smack to a minimum by keeping all the discussion homogeneous, I'm not sure that's an entirely positive attribute either.

Reading threads more fully, though a lot of people have been talking about June 1 as a decision date, I think it's because we were concerned about the window to withdraw from the NCC. I don't see that anyone knew June 1 was a new NCAA rule; in fact, just a month ago Tony quoted the NCAA manual as saying September 1.

No kidding. I'm with CDog on this one. Haven't we all (on the board) been talking about June 1 since this Spring? I thought we had always been discussing 2007-08 as an exploratory year because of the 18 month NCC withdrawal window.

Interesting what different Fullerton quotes the Herald publishes than the Forum... Emphasis mine.

You have to stop attacking everyone on the board who challenges your anti-administration viewpoints. I think everyone gets it by now that you don't like UND athletics' administration. Everyone is free to continue to use this board to have factual discussions of public figures' actions, including criticisms of their public actions, but exercising personal vendettas and attacking posters who disagree aren't welcome.

That's what I was trying to say The Forum's "UND can't possibly get into Big Sky" quote also collaterally excluded NDSU from consideration -- oops. That Big Sky added UNC in transition and keeps requesting info from UND/SDSU/NDSU demonstrates that it's not a strict criterion, but the quote certainly suggests that transition status is a significant consideration.

Their Fullerton quote certainly attempts to paint it as if he won't consider any school in transition (i.e. no UND, NDSU, or SDSU): Of course, Big Sky already took UNC while still in transition, and has asked NDSU, SDSU, and UND to submit institutional profiles during each of the previous two expansion rounds, so I'll take that more as affirmation that transition status is a consideration (for at least one person). Buning suggests that a transition with an NDSU-like transitional faux conference is acceptable to UND:

True. Primer on how to quote. After you reply to a specific message, just add your reply after the final [ /quote] tag (for bonus points, trim the message inside the [ quote]... [ /quote] tags down to the relevant portion). Feel free to practice in the linked thread.

Yeah, things haven't been particularly stable so far on this new server -- another hiccup this afternoon. I'm still trying to tweak it a bit, but if I can't get it better soon, we'll give up on these guys and move back to the hard-drive destroyers for now. UPDATE -- Monday night: ok, the new server just couldn't cut it. We're back to the old one for now.

My guess is that star2city thinks the dream of BSC adding two more schools kind of died when they took UNC (note also the lack of NDSU + UND choice).

Forum Communications to tour Herald today

Whatchyou talkin' 'bout Willis? By my math... Football (non-playoff)? 2005 10126/game 2004 9555/game 2003 9423/game *hosted NDSU 2002 9488/game WBB (I'm too lazy to recalc w/out playoffs)? 05-06 2292/game 04-05 2231/game 03-04 2387/game *hosted NDSU 02-03 2444/game *hosted NDSU I'm actually a supporter of moving to D-I because I don't think the Sioux are playing their athletic or academic peers anymore, which could lead to declining attendance if quality and opponents decline, but I don't see it yet (assuming I managed to calculate correctly).

Obviously the question was something like "Should UND remain D-I in hockey and D-II in other sports or spend an additional $1.5m per year to reclassify other sports to D-I?". Despite the possibly poisoned question, at least one result is similar to NDSU's at the same point (26% of faculty for), but the UND community maintains its well-known focus on wanting answers on conference first (90% think its important). Hidden among the survey results is that some of the money could be there: This precisely mirrors what I perceive as the prevailing sentiment on this board -- we're ready to reclassify and help get the extra money IF UND can explain who we'll playing against or how they're going to pay the extra expense, but we have a lesser willingness to follow the SU's and jump in hoping it will work out sooner rather than later (I felt this same way when NDSU was moving 4 years ago, too).

I don't follow why it's acceptable to bring this problem to the judiciary but the legislative branch shouldn't consider it? The judiciary is just there to apply and interpret existing law (sort of), so if legislators think the NCAA is behaving in a manner inconsistent with the public good but don't think existing laws adequately express that, the creation of new laws that explicitly spell out the NCAA's authority is quite appropriate, IMHO.

It's a good point, there's nothing more frustrating than feeling like rules are applied arbitrarily (we may be capricious, but we try not to be arbitrary). I was actually concerned about that post myself; however, by the time I had seen it, another moderator had moved it from one forum to another, so I decided to just stick with that and let it ride. It did feel more on-topic -- before a big Bison game, we always let the smack go a lot more in the lead-up threads because that's a big part of the rivalry and excitement and doesn't distract from the primary mission (to talk about UND athletics). I think slamming Dr. Brand is a similarly timely reaction to contemporary events whereas an anti-Gophers thread falls under the umbrella of "this is a pro-UND site, not anti-xxx rival". I do appreciate these conversations and really do consider every comment, as we're anxious to provide the best possible environment for people to discuss the Fighting Sioux.

We're generally pretty good about sending notices explaining removed posts, but I'm admittedly less good about following up when a troll/smack thread is locked or entirely blown away. Sorry I failed to follow up in this case, a moderator even reminded me to. Sioux-cia's right -- while there are certainly no shortage of jabs back and forth between Sioux fans and their rivals on the board, a thread explicitly dedicating to hating the Gophers is just pure smack. While I still haven't succeeding in creating a formal set of rules, What is smack? is still the guiding principle -- if the obvious primary purpose of a thread is to annoy, we don't want it.

I think the IAA game exemption doesn't kick in until 2007, anyway. I also think you're right that beginning this year you need 10 qualifying games to make the post-season (I remember this because some of our GLIAC friends habitually schedule only 10 games and then drop one as a "no contest").

Considering that this is your first post ever outside the "Sioux Name" forum, it's not surprising that you've missed the actual point of the site -- being a University of North Dakota athletics fan! No doubt SiouxSports.com is sorely disappointing to someone whose only interest in UND athletics seems to be to protest its nickname. We don't all have to agree on the nickname controversy to appreciate some of the best teams in D-II (and D-I). Try chatting about the actual athletics teams and you will see what a great place this can be, you might even find yourself a little less churlish cheering "for" something rather than just "against".

While the "link?, link?, link?" stereotype is comical and based in truth, I just reread gordwiser's post and the immediate reaction, and its responses and thought they were very reasonable (at least for the page or so that it stayed on topic). Belief in a future event is a sliding scale: A trustworthy source revealing intent goes a long way, confirmation from multiple sources confirming that intent pushes it closer toward certainty, but it's never really true until the contract is signed. Best of luck, Drew. We appreciate the time you spent at UND.

Though a new thread is fine, just thought I'd point out this has been the primary discussion of the schedule thread for the past week before it made the local news; look there for more talk on the subject.

CHA appears saved College hockey may have just dodged a huge bullet.