jimdahl

Well, I'd still let schools pick, just restricted to picking from divisions for which they meet the objective standards. This is already in place for I-A football. If you have 15,000 fans per game, you can classify as I-A, if you don't you can't. However, 15,000 doesn't force you to go I-A in football, it just permits it; schools (Montana?) that average more than 15k per game can still choose to classify as I-AA (or even II or III) for institutional reasons. My proposal is adding a similar system (perhaps also including minimum funding) to the other divisions of football (at least I-AA and II) and to other sports, as needed. A primary critique against Kupchella's ala carte proposal is that 1000 small schools could misclassify themselves as D-I in basketball to try to chase TV $$$, while not really fielding an objectively D-I caliber team. This idea is a way to extend Kupchella's ala carte division proposal to ensure schools classify each sport in a suitable division; it further has the benefit of using techniques already in place in NCAA governance.

Well, no other sports have a I-AA, so you'd be talking a move to D-I in basketball and all other sports. I struggle to imagine any sport in which UND would quickly be nationally competitive in D-I, outside of swimming & diving. The goal for basketball would change from a national championship to making the playoffs and getting to play a first round bodybag game against Duke or UConn. I would guess that most college basketball players would rather play to win their D-I conference and make a March Madness appearance than win a D-II championship. Pure speculation on my part, though.

Though you hear some grumbling about the influx of small schools into the bottom tiers of D-I, does it really affect big schools' revenue or influence that much? I thought the vast majority of the basketball dollars went to the big schools? Plus, as long as the big D-I's still bring in all the $$$, they have de facto control of the NCAA, no matter how many mid-tier schools jump up to I-AA or I-AAA. Do the top tier schools really care how many hundreds of schools are competing for those bottom 15 Big Dance autobids? The schools that I would actually expect to be most opposed to such a change are the NDSU's of the world who aren't that dissimiliar from UND but who feel like they sacrificed all their minor sports to play football at a higher level -- they wouldn't want to see smaller athletic programs that couldn't transition all sports derive the benefit of playing football at that higher level. My proposal, linked above, solves the problem of 1000 schools opting up to play basketball at D-I by linking the ala carte system with division membership requirements. If a school can average 4000 fans per basketball game, they can go D-I in that sport; if they can average 10000 fans per football game, they can go D-I in that sport. That's not a huge leap from the current soft limit on DI-A football membership.

If we're tooting our own horns, I would have thought you were going to provide a link to the first reference to this idea. Aside from making sure D2football and I get our proper glory, the real point of digging up that post was that it included my reasons why such a change is nearly impossible: It would only benefit the small schools and D-I legislation tends to be about preserving the status of the big schools. I also don't think you're going to see anyone rush to abandon multi-sport conferences any time soon, so those schools that are not D-I across all sports would always be the ugly stepchildren. And then, of course, there's Title IX, you'd have to attach women's programs to men's to ensure that women got the same opportunities at the same level. Point #2 is big. If such a rule change came about (very unlikely if, IMHO), would conferences like Big Sky and pre-expansion ACC start accepting football-only members, or would they still prefer all-sport conferences? If the latter, that would relegate schools that played up to distinctly lesser single sport conferences. It works in hockey because there's no alignment between hockey conferences and most schools' other multi-sport conferences.

Announced yesterday, Digger didn't make the cut to the final 3. Beschorner, USD QB, is representing the NCC in competition with Brittingham (RB) of Bloomsburg University and Terwilliger (QB) of East Stroudsburg. If you're sensing a pattern as to which side of the ball wins these things, you're right...

Now that I've gotten a few hours sleep, let me give a little additional info for those interested. The majority of web sites use something called "shared hosting", where you provide content or pay your provider to develop content and the provider hosts that content on a big web server that's actually shared with other sites. The owner of the server keeps up the all the software, you just manage your own content. However, sites that have a lot traffic and custom programming, like this one, use too many resources so don't play well with others so we quit using shared hosting quite a few years ago. In between shared hosting and having your own staffed datacenter is paying a big data center to keep a server in a rack (or provide a "virtual" server in a larger server) and supply it with power and network connectivity. You may just pay them to make sure its up, or you can pay them to help maintain the operating system and server software. As various faults have happened in the past, I've taken over more of those tasks myself, so now I'm managing pretty much everything (the OS, server software) because I've felt like they weren't providing the level of service I wanted. (Economists might have something to say about comparative vs. absolute advantage at this point, bluntly meaning my time is probably better spent managing the content, regardless). The one real aspect I haven't been able to take over is daily backups. Dumping the entire database from a remote server in a data center to a machine of mine would involve moving hundreds of megabytes over the Internet to my home. Doing that with high frequency isn't particularly practical, rather you want to perform high frequency backups on a device close to the server. Needless to say, the one part I don't directly control proved the weak link that let us down in this failure. That's why I find it so frustrating.

The one other interesting thing that happened in the "missing" period that needed reintroduction into the official record is Carthage College and Midwestern State agreed to stop using Indian names / imagery.

Both of these happened in the "missing period", so I just wanted to drop in placeholders: IUP Indians appeal rejected Illinois appeal accepted, but Chief must go

Herald article yesterday:

The most disappointing thing about not being able to access the board yesterday was not being able to post this juicy update:

Remember just before the Wisconsin series? Gas was $3.00/gallon, the football team was looking forward to locking up a bye and some home field by winning at USD, and the Sioux were looking forward to getting some points off Wisconsin at home. I just thought it would be fun to revisit those halcyon times. For anyone who missed it, real story is here.

Since I was invoked by name... I do appreciate people keeping the smack level low when its not specifically related to an upcoming big game, but talk not directly about UND is welcome, it just has to fit the mission of one of the forums. The community forum is full of non-UND stuff, the football and hockey forums often have discussions of opponents and teams of regional interest (including NDSU). Any more in-depth discussion of postings standards and policies should probably take place in the Admin forum. SiouxSports.com enthusiastically welcomes new sites and forums dedicated to UND to the neighborhood. More about the Sioux on the net is a great thing, particularly coming from a site formerly dedicated to a former adversary!

UND is going to pass up and down the field with large receiver sets, just like Duluth showed us we could. Bring on the scoring (but higher risk of TO's?) Special teams, baby. Contrary to popular wisdom, I don't think USD is going to be trying to get in a shootout, rather I think they'll want to slow the game down. Nonetheless, a poised UND offense will drive to quite a few scores but will also have a few missteps, leading to high scoring for both teams. UND prevails in the end 37-27. Meanwhile, GVSU's loss to Tech puts us in 1st place in the region and at home throughout the playoffs OK, now I'm just getting silly.

Appeal is analytical and legalistic

My impression is that discussion here comes from three primary groups: alums (usually distant), students, people connected to the sports (staff, parents, etc...). Even though there are plenty of people in G.F. going to the games, they aren't necessarily hanging out on message boards because they're able to get their news and do their kibitzing locally. Basketball just isn't the big social event that hockey & football is for the students, and really isn't something that most alums follow once they're gone because there isn't a lot of news available and the teams aren't particularly successful right now. That said, go to the football forum and go back a couple years and there was 1/5 to 1/10 the discussion there is now. Success of the program has certainly helped, but a couple of us just regularly posting and creating discussions amongst ourselves also led to additional people joining in.

Here's the old thread about flying into G.F. It's still awful because you have to take NWA and connect through Minneapolis, so always overpriced.

Though Kirk already knew this... recent homes have included the Twin Cities area (Minnetonka & Plymouth) and Madison area (Madison & Middleton), but I'm now back in the D.C. area (NoVA), birthplace and world headquarters of SiouxSports.com

Interesting point -- ticket exchanges have always been more infrequent in the past, whereas now there are quite a few such threads in the hockey forum. I wonder if that reflects a growing preference to trade tickets with a SiouxSports.com fan, or if its just a temporary blip because REA's ticket exchange is down? Clearly if it proves to be the former, it should have its own forum. The drawback is that such threads will be slightly less noticed in a dedicated ticket forum.

Hydrogen lab going up by old REA this spring

Errr... spoke to soon. The calculations in my head apparently weren't that great -- quick back of the envelope calculations tell me that our opp. win% will be nearly equal next week (UND would have an edge of only about .002, if the D2+ group includes the teams I think it does). UNO has the H2H tie-breaker and an advantage in the new last 4 comparison, while UND holds the common opponents edge. I'm going to retreat to claim that UND really needs the road win over a top team to boost the QWI, which would create a nice gap between UND and UNO on that criterion.

The big new criteria is opponents' win percentage (excluding games against you). UNO effectively just played a 1.000 team (our loss against them doesn't count), while UND played a .750 team (UNO's win over us doesn't count). That was enough for UNO to cross UND in opponents' win %, by my calculation. In that same calculation, I have UND with a slight edge over UNO in SSI. Don't worry, though, it's just a quirk of the schedule order. We have yet to play USD, at .800, while UNO gets to play a nearly winless Mankato. Win or lose, that should push our opp% back above UNO's.

The slowness may have been related to the problem I was discussing here. I'm going to be away for a few hours, but please post details of any ongoing problems in that thread and I'll check it when I get a chance.

DNS problem fixed, machine rebooted again so all the programs would get the updates. This should at least solve the front page problem, keep me informed about the other.

Ah, that I can duplicate. There seems to be some trouble with one of the caches that helps that page build quickly (starting Sunday morning), so the page keeps trying to load this resource until it times out (30 secs would be my guess). I'll look into that. Maybe if we're lucky the two will turn out to be related... Update -- the tried and true debugging method of rebooting didn't help. It actually seems to be a network problem; SiouxSports.com is having troubles contacting its DNS, for the techies.

If you hit submit twice it will send or post the message twice; if you somehow find yourself in that situation, it's best to wait. However, it isn't supposed to be possible because once you hit the "Submit" button, the button is supposed to be disabled to prevent that very problem. I can't duplicate the slowdown you're getting after posting / sending a PM. Plenty of people do seem to be posting and sending PM's, so either they're a patient group or the problem is somewhat isolated. Are more people seeing that? Is it every time? Do you get stuck at the "Thanks" screen or the screen with the button? Are you hitting the button again or hitting reload? Browser / version? Internet connection type / speed?