jimdahl

The Sioux could actually still finish 10th. It would take a pretty odd scenario. Blatant plug -- no need to crunch those numbers, the web site does it for you.

Since you asked... while it's true that so pronounced a late-season swoon usually has a much more deleterious effect on tournament seeding, the Gophers have won the right the games this year. By going an amazing 17-9 against teams currently under consideration, they win that point in almost every PWR comparison. It's quite intentional (and sound, IMHO) that teams that win against tough competition are ranked higher than teams with similar records but mostly losses against the elite competitors. Combine that with an RPI bolstered by arguably the toughest schedule in the nation, and they certainly deserve to be in the tournament. They similarly don't seem to deserve a #1 seed at this point, and there's a fair chance they'll lose it by the end of the regular season because of their falling RPI from having to finally play the "weaker" WCHA teams (I had the exact magnitude of the drop projected and posted on POI, but don't care to repeat the exercise). If they manage to turn it around and win out or do well in the conference tournament to lock up the 1-seed, it will have been well-earned. Any coach who wants a good seed should be paying attention to their coincidental mediocrity and great ranking -- if you want a good tournament seed, schedule tough competition and beat them; then you can afford a few slipups against the Tech's and AA's.

There's a certain irony to the claim, "The INCH 4x4 represents how we think the NCAA Tournament brackets will look when they are announced, not if the season were to end today"; yet in a week UND didn't play, they decided that instead of not making the tournament, UND would be a #3 seed.

The Herald says:

This thread was previously inactive for over 6 months, but I'm pleased to reassure you that you can get your high school hockey fix in the relatively new Community forum in threads such as this one.

I read it as him just trying to drum up business for the nascent site. FWIW - in my opinion, discussion of other teams of interest (opponents, regional teams, etc...) is fine. Unfortunately, threads about SDSU/NDSU tend to devolve into the tired old DI smack/trolling/bashing (e.g.), which is not fine.

Nitty Gritty, near the Kohl Center, forces turnover. For a few hours before the game, you can only be seated while waiting for food/eating. Then you have to stand with your beer so someone else can sit and eat. If there are enough potential customers willing to patronize an establishment with those rules, they can probably get 3 turns before a typical game.

With fans starting to wonder if UND will make the NCAA tournament and certain media already counting the Sioux out, it seemed like a good time to take a look at UND's PWR outlook. Not reproduced here because of the limited support for formatting, A look at UND's PWR and playoff chances

Major media continues its inability to distinguish North Dakota towns and colleges as the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein sinks to NY Times-quality fact-checking. Bush Shops Social Security Plan Regardless, nice to see North Dakota continue it's political importance and get some big city press coverage, even if UND specifically was undeserving.

That's really cool that one of the top sports bars was specifically cited for carrying UND hockey. Living in the East (but NOT in the college hockey part), I'm still sometimes pleasantly surprised by the ubiquity of North Dakota hockey.

Here's a complete list of top 25 (to get the text/descriptions, you need to be an SI subscriber). I'm feeling like quite a sports bar afficianado, having been to: 1. (?) The Fours (Boston) 4. Major Goolsby's (Milwaukee) 13. (+) State St Brats (Madison) 15. (+) Joe Senser's (Bloomington) 16. Three Dollar Cafe (Atlanta) 20. (+) Crystal City Sports Pub (Arlington) 23. Playmaker's (Fargo) ? = I'm only about 50% certain this is the place I think it is, just South of Fleet Center + = Five or more visits AND watched at least one Sioux game there (whereas others were places I got lucky and stumbled into while traveling) Nice to see so much regional (Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota) strength on the list. A lot of that has to do with the quality of fans, because I don't necessarily think of State St Brats has having a better sports-watching setup than Crystal City Sports Pub (or even Playmaker's), for example. When you take into account fans/game-time atmosphere, then I agree overall with the relative rankings of those to which I've been to watch games.

Where's the faith? The Sioux are still mathematically capable of finishing in 1st! (note, that page doesn't auto-update, so while it is correct as of the time of this post, may not be after future games until I bother to run the simulation again)

The Dakota Student has a Q&A with the General Manager.

Oops -- yeah, we were just trying to cut down on intra-moderator email (which has become voluminous lately) by hosting such discussions in an access-controlled forum here. It hadn't occurred to me that the front page code that grabs recent topics would need to check access controls because, until this exception, there's only been a single level of access. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Hmmm.... sure enough, it does seem broken. I'll take a look and report back.

FWIW, KRACH predicts UND has a 78.3% chance of winning each game. That would leave Bemidji with a 4.7% chance of a sweep. That is, of course, based on both teams' actual performance against chains of common opponents throughout this entire season. It assumes performance is constant through the season so wouldn't take into account any sort of slump, nor does it account for missing players or other special circumstances. What it does show us is that UND really is in an entirely different class from Bemidji this year and that if they played 100 games, UND would easily win most. However, they're only playing 2 and Bemidji (and fans and columnists) smell blood in the water.

To reiterate the timeline as PCM already outlined, UND issued the press release largely because the rumors were ALREADY running rampant. There had been posts on this message board very early Monday that we removed because at the time they were unverifiable; many people had seen this rumor but were doing exactly the right thing by sitting on it to wait for confirmation. Once UND officially confirmed some facts, hastily reintroducing those confirmed facts into this forum was exactly the right move. Posting links to external writings, news releases, photos, your personal thoughts, etc... about the Sioux is precisely the purpose of this forum.

The problem with having each sport at an institution play at an arbitrary level is that everyone (schools, NCAA, fans) likes multi-sport conferences, which require schools to have an overall level. However, the new NCC commissioner's proposal of just having different classification for football is being discussed in the NCAA: That would result in new "alliances" that contain former IAA's and II's, sorted by football scholarships instead of geography/level of other sports. Since a lot of people here think a IAA transition would be suicide for all sports but football (I still claim it would be good for basketball also, but that's about it), this solution would mitigate that problem. I wouldn't hold your breath on this exact proposal, but its nice to see the NCAA continuing to discuss the problem.

Answering truthfully got me to a state bordering my home, which would be more impressive had the questions not included a specific geographical reference. Apparently I'm out of touch, though, since I can find Minnesota easily, but not North Dakota

1963 cochamps. That season the Sioux went on to defeat Denver for their 2nd ever NCAA championship!

My guess is that they weren't specifically targeted, rather they were hit by an Internet worm searching out sites running PHP-BB (the free bulletin board software they use for their Ticket Exchange) that aren't running the newest security fixes. Keeping an Internet-facing server secure isn't easy, it used to take months for newly discovered problems to be exploited, now its days or even hours.

While I'm normally loath to post log data because we don't want to "out" anyone, this aggregate data seems harmless enough; here are the domains that have visited SiouxSports.com this month, in descending order of number of visits. Down to about Mexico they're definitely real visits (>1Mb transferred), under that could be mistypes/flukes, though some of them are undoubtedly a single legitimate visit: Network net Commercial com Unknown ip USA Educational edu United States us USA Government gov Canada ca USA Military mil Non-Profit Organizations org Australia au Old style Arpanet arpa Netherlands nl Tuvalu tv United Kingdom uk Norway no Germany de Finland fi Brazil br Sweden se Austria at Mexico mx Switzerland ch Romania ro Japan jp France fr Israel il Belgium be Denmark dk Russian Federation ru Poland pl Saint Helena sh Iceland is Slovak Republic sk Guernsey gg Ascension Island ac Niue nu[/code] I see someone out in UND-wear no less than once a month near my undisclosed home no fewer than 1327mi from Grand Forks.