jimdahl

I promised this a little while ago. Just for comparison's sake, here's what RPI would look like for D2 football with the following assumptions: only games against D2 opponents are counted, RPI is weighted 25%/50%/25% (which I believe is what both DI hockey/DI basketball use). D2 football RPI (by region) RPI explained (from the perspective of how to calculate it, as opposed to explanation for layman) About Central Washington The anomoly that probably jumps out most is Central Washington. That is related to the sparseness of football schedules, CWU has only played 5 contests against D2 opponents and those 5 opponents have a winning percentage of .75. That gives them BY FAR the toughest schedule of teams under consideration in the NW, with the next toughest opponents win% being .57. As Central Washington gets a couple more mandatory conference games under its belt against more mediocre teams, Western Washington (.5105) and Western Oregon (.250), their opponents win% will decline. In recognition that so few contests are played in football, we could also bring them more in line immediately by weighting opponents-opponents win% a little more heavily (thereby saying, even if all your opponents average .600, thats not so impressive if their opponents average .450). Modifying RPI In reality, everyone who uses RPI modifies it to add some other goals. Basketball adds in factors for strong wins, h2h, and some other factors. Hockey performs a more complex pairwise comparison in which every team under consideration (RPI > .500) is compared to every other team on the basis of RPI, head to head, common opponents, and results against other teams under consideration. Clearly such a computation would be customized to the goals of the sport, but applying the hockey formula exactly yields the following Pairwise comparison.

Today's Herald notes that a lot of UNO's success has been the consistent running attack from Day. Omaha.com talks about how their success at running has been opening up the bootleg pass to Ostlund. While I'm not expecting a Ferris St-like running letdown, I think the Sioux can hold that style of game reasonably in check. A couple other interesting quotes from the articles above: Hard to disagree with everyone that it could be a grind it out ground game.

Though admittedly worthless at this point, PWR is starting to become defined for some teams (those teams that don't have an RPI defined, don't have a PWR; your RPI is undefined if any of your opponents have not played an opponent other than you or if any of your opponents' opponents meet that criteria). KRACH is starting to connect up a little; there are now 30 teams that can be compared (though 4 WCHA teams ahead of UND isn't surprising, AA may not be one of them as their schedule gains a few more results).

I agree in principal with IowaBison that football in general is just so much bigger in the South that the D2 championship draws the locals more than it might in G.F. I wasn't there in '01, but was last year, and even in the awful rain there was a fair contingent of locals (though certainly not 5000-6000 like IowaBison posited). If the game rotated more, it would be a more unique event in its host town and draw better than holding in the same town year after year. The real attendance question is would other team's die-hard fans be less willing to travel to N.D. than Florence? They're both kind of middle-of-nowhere "hick" reputation places; neither has any magnificent other tourist attractions. Alabama is certainly more central for the Southern teams, and provides a nice warm getaway for fans of Northern teams. No small part of the huge GVSU contingent at the games was that GVSU is a ~10 hour drive, G.F. ~24. How many fans of these Southern schools will drive 24+ hours to N.D. in the winter? The biggest difference is that G.F. has significantly better hotel availability and sports facilities, though the NCAA might have a bias against a dome.

If I have the time of the field goal right, the home shutout streak ended at 238:44, 3 games. Home winning streak TBD, but looks safe for now.

Nah, I didn't even know that was a particular source of pride. Using scores on a ticker as a milestone is humorously timed, in that I noticed this year ESPN has been running the top DII scores; every Saturday night I see N. Dakota and our football game result scroll across ESPN at my undisclosed local watering hole. However, it is understandable; when Kupchella talks about how we already have one D-I sport, I forget that other DII schools have never seen their premier sport on the regional FSN's, on the ESPN ticker, etc... Guess I've been taking the few series/year on FSN for granted; unfortunately, with only 1 Gopher series and no games at Denver, I think this year is an all-time low I've been lobbying my cable company to add CSTV which seems like it will have at least 1 Sioux game/year, but so far they haven't bitten.

It honestly never occurred to me to list national broadcasts of games as news, but I guess it is newsworthy. The games' availability on FSN/DirecTV was mentioned on the UND alumni listing I mentioned here, but I'll also start posting it as news on the front page.

There are limited numbers available for the public, but media relations reports that they aren't yet in stock so don't panic if you don't receive it right away. Send a request for your men's hockey media guide with a check for $12 payable to UND to: UND Athletic Media Relations PO Box 9013 Grand Forks, N.D. 58203

The whole ebay empire is pretty thuggishly PC. Paypal, which originally used to bill itself as a great way to make payments for your office pool, now outright bans any sort of payment to a settle a wager or "mature" content payment. I think the former was fear of government crackdown, but I suspect ebay would also love to do the latter if they weren't making big $$$ off it. This move, though, sure disagrees with their stated policy on offensive material, which begins:

Sioux fans around the country, don't forget the annual Sioux vs. Gophers hockey watching parties are this Saturday. Complete list at UND Alumni web site. Here are the sites: Bismarck, ND Bloomington, MN Boise, ID Cedar Rapids, Iowa Colorado Springs, CO Des Moines, Iowa Durham, NC Madison, Wis. Memphis, TN Mesa, AZ Omaha, Neb. Portland, Oregon Rock Springs, Wyo. San Diego, CA San Francisco Seattle Troy, MI (Detroit area) Washington, DC

OK, you got me; this post so brusque that I don't know its point. Are you trying to say the two division idea Sicatoka was mentioning works for hockey but not other sports because hockey has a smaller member base? If so, I disagree. I think the sticking point to number of divisions for a sport is how many levels of championships you want to hold, which is dependent on the number of plateaus of competitiveness, which is tied to the sports' number of scholarships. In Football it would be difficult to have only two divisions because a full load requires so many scholarships that its nice to have a post-season tournament for teams that only support a percentage of the scholarships, requiring another division (hence DI currently being split into IA and IAA). In basketball, which like hockey requires fewer scholarhips, one giant DI seems to work; I'm not sure why an even bigger scholarship division wouldn't.

Well, there goes any productivity this week. I had pretty much already decided to look into it tomorrow. The insular schedule problem isn't going away, that's why Massey uses margin-of-victory and BCS uses all those polls. However, I expect the opponents-opponents win% in RPI will do a little more than anything SSI does, and I expect Bradley-Terry to do better still at sorting out the strengths of the conferences. The other big question is how to handle out-of-division games. The SSI system treatment of out-of-division opponents is also pretty arbitrary; I would prefer to either consider games only against other opponents being ranked (Divisional opponents who have a known strength) or calculate a ranking for all NCAA teams (ala Massey) so your rankings of non-Divisional opponents' strengths aren't arbitrary. Sorry, everyone, for straying so far afield. You may now resume regularly schedule regional ranking griping.

You're right, the insular schedules would still be a problem; however, it may not be any worse, as UND92,96 explained well above, the current SSI sure isn't immune. Scrapping the SSI just strikes me as an important first step to get rid of the arbitrary plateaus (>.700, .500-.700, <.500) and arbitrary point values (does a win over a DII opponent >.700 on the road really imply your schedule is precisely 130% more difficult than a loss to a DII opponent >.500 on the road?) That would be a more sound rating base that the committee could tweak as desired (modify for head-to-head, common opponents, etc..., as the NCAA does for hockey) or tweak in the smoke-filled room. Since I have all the data now, maybe I'll try to run some more "standard" ratings systems against the D-II football data to see how they look.

If there's one thing I've determined decisively over the last few weeks, it's that there's something else going on in the regional rankings other than pure SSI/win% (GVSU > Winona, SCSU > Northwood). I suspect the wins over ranked opponents (or even an arbitrary "quality of wins") is going to matter a lot more at the end than a couple 1/10ths on SSI. It's a shame, because the system could have that all built in. I do, RPI. It's used everywhere else in the NCAA and doesn't unnecessarily mix win% with SOS. It evaluates them objectively, separately, and predictably. Unfortunately, it doesn't send in that balance of teams from less represented conferences that the NCAA seems to want, though I think the conference autobids more than accomplish that. Not wanting to leave selection to a formula is understandable, but you can always reserve the right to tweak in the smoke-filled room to create drama like basketball does.

If you haven't yet, you might also want to try REA's ticket exchange and USCHO's ticket marketplace; both see a lot more ticket trading activity than here.

And Ferris St. (whose RB had set the all-time single game rushing record the week before) for an entire game. Sure, the Sioux aren't shutting out GVSU (yet ), but we're also not giving up points to Montana Tech. It's very hard not to give up some points even to the worst team, so to run that long a shutout streak is absolutely amazing. If it weren't, other teams would be doing it all the time, too.

One question that's come up here several times, in discussion ranging from the the Betty Engelstad Center to a possible D-I move, is how much new money is UND getting from REA. Going from 6067 to 12000 tickets per game is big $$$. Some interesting numbers were hidden in the midst of an "impact study": Ticket Revenue Men

Wow, yet another INT for SCSU. Near the 50.

So by my count, as of today's win: 205 minutes and 36 seconds of home shutout 3 consecutive home shutout games 15 game home winning streak incl. playoffs

Sioux change QBs, Belmore out, Manke in.

Despite unusual difficulties getting a media pass, official Midwest Dahl-family representative and intrepid amateur photographer, John, got some good looking photos. (From the stands?) 10/16/04 UND at Mankato Photos If you haven't used the SiouxSports.com photo galleries before, the images on that page are thumbnails. Click on the thumbnail to see a much higher resolution version.

Didn't see this mentioned elsewhere here, the UMD announcers just said Saginaw beat GVSU 31-20.

Oops, go here and half way down on the left it says something like "click here to unlock your tuner" in yellow text. Click on that and wade in. Good luck!

The UMD audio is working, but it's a real pain. You have to go in through IE only, then it installs an ActiveX control, then you have to install special software, run it, then you sit through a commercial, then you have to "list all stations" and find WEBC News/Talk in Duluth. UND 3, UMD 0. Hopefully someone else can get that working because unfortunately, I can't stick around to give updates. I'll be back in an hour or two.

OK, I'm confused. I thought legend334 was talking about a massive NCAA shakeup of the divisional system, but I thought Sicatoka was referring to UND reclassifying as an individual institution (which is what I thought O'Keefe was speculating about in the quote). As to my relatively worthless opinion, I could see UND reclassifying within 5 years; I'd be surprised to see the NCAA scrap the current divisions (though small shakeups, such as actually enforcing attendance limits or adding a II-AA, wouldn't surprise me).