jimdahl

Even though we don't necessarily know how they all correlate, I'm still working on calculating all the factors that we know are considered. The formatting is still inelegant, but in addition to the SSI details, I just added the results against common opponents (COP) and head-to-head (H2H) results to the rankings page.

My first guess was actually 38-10, but I edited it to take/give a TD from each to be conservative. The Sioux have never really run up the score, except against such overmatched teams as Crookston and poor Mesa St, so I would never predict much above 40 for UND. To run up those big scores also requires the offense to be clicking, which was kind of happening last week, but I still wonder if Belmore will make it two weeks in a row. As far as the Bulldog score, the UND defense has been inconsistent a few times this season and I was guessing at a bit of a letdown after the Sioux establish the lead. Just some wild guesses from a guy who hasn't even seen 1 game this year; I'd love nothing more than to be completely wrong and have 60 minutes added to the shutout streak

I seem to like bullets this morning. UMD gave Nebraska-Omaha a bit of a run at UNO (24-38 final, Bulldogs rallied for 3 fourth quarter TDs -- can anyone think of any other team prone to taking a lead then having periods of massive meltdown?) The Sioux could have a bit of a letdown after manhandling the other Bulldogs (my favorite Eblen observation: "Ferris could have played all week long against UND and not scored a point.") Bubba knows the Sioux Bulldogs are pretty dependent on the run, which the Sioux are pretty good at stopping I can never bring myself to call any NCC game a "gimme" The Sioux D put together 4 full quarters last week The Sioux QB situation looked a little less dire last week, though Ferris wasn't exactly applying pressure As mentioned elsewhere, UMD was kind of pathetic against Moorhead Alerus = -7 points opponents, +7 points Sioux UND 31 UMD 17

Now that Bison fans have finished the mandatory decrying of hockey's popularity in N.D., back on topic. My list is a little different from others', so I'll explain: 1. Men's Hockey This one is indisputable, based on demand for tickets, attendance, and success. 2. Football Even disregarding UND's recent national success, FB is arguably the #1 sport in the nation. Attendance rivaled only by hockey. UND is one of the few schools at which it isn't #1, so it's an easy #2. 3. W. BB Another oddity -- women's BB ahead of men? It's all about success. Their recent successes mean that the casual fan hears more about them and looks for more news. 4. M. BB Arguably the #2 sport in the nation (and #2 at most other schools, #1 at a few). 5. W. Volleyball Attendance -- people go to these games (legend334 - I thought more than baseball). 6. Swimming/diving Not commonly thought of as a spectator sport, but what Sioux fan doesn't watch the headlines in February to make sure we win our annual NCC championship? 7. Women's hockey / baseball Women's hockey inherits a little cachet from men's hockey, the Sioux play the big rivals like Minnesota. The program is new, success isn't there yet. Baseball used to be America's pasttime, is spectator friendly, and the games do draw a couple hundred fans. I think UND is very unusual for how wildly the traditional football/m. basketball pair of leaders has been dislodged.

Only teams with overall records >.500 are under consideration, so even if Mankato, Duluth, or Augustana had a better SSI, they still couldn't be considered because they're each 1 game under .500. The SSI is also different from most strength-of-schedule indexes in that it actually includes a win percentage component; a loss is generally worth 6 points fewer than a win. So, if you play a lot of tough competition and lose, your SSI will unintuitively be lower than if you play easy competition and win.

Doh -- my mistake. While that definitely slipped by me, it now seems most likely that Kupchella was listing the closest possible conference in each I-A and I-AA; I guess only Kupchella could tell us.

I suspect he was only including multi-sport conferences that sponsor football, one of the few sports that would stand a chance of being nationally competitive after a reclassification, since it would be in the I-AA subdivision.

That certainly does give some confirmation of Kupchella's current outlook vis-a-vis reclassification. No surprise here, the alums are putting on pressure because it seems like all the other good D-II schools have reclassified so we're all asking why UND hasn't. This is the trickiest part; I-AA has more scholarships, but is really another second-tier division, it's still not big-time BCS football. Of course, I'm talking football only, but my biggest concern when former NCC members were reclassifying was that it involves moving football to a better division in which we still could be competitive, but sacrifices the competitiveness of many more minor sports, as Kupchella alludes to: When discussing this issue a couple years ago, I was generally a proponet of UND moving with the former NCC schools. I still claim that as a fan I prefer for the basketball teams to have their goal be a conference championship and an appearance in the Big Dance rather than a D-II NC; and that I was willing to see programs other than football and swimming&diving suffer, but I can certainly understand Kupchella's concerns about the impact for a lot student-athletes.

That must be for the road win vs. Vermont, since it was an NC game. The PWR pages here were fresh on my mind because I'm actually working this afternoon on making the RPI results more valid in the early season (right now I assume a team with no games played has a win% of 1.0, whereas it actually needs to be marked undefined). My wife has been distracted by a new video game for the last couple weeks, giving me an inordinate amount of free programming time

I hate to be the one to say it, but the game's only half over. If this were last season, the Sioux would now come out in the 2nd half and give Ferris 31 points, then win on a last minute 50-yd field goal. I really hope they come out strong!

Oops, that's right. It was a passing play which was a reception then fumble. Go Augie! Update: Belmore to Wisthoff 21-0 Sioux 12:55 remaining in the half

Sioux, 3 possessions, 2 TDs Ferris, 2 possessions, 1 INT 14-0 Sioux

I explain it somewhat here. As it said, it's just a machine-readable format of the news listings. If there were 20 news sites that you looked at frequently, you could use an RSS-reader to pull the headlines from all of those sites into a single interface. It draws from the same database as the human readable football and hockey pages, so both will be always be simultaneously updated whenever a new article is added. In short, yes, all articles will continue to be available from the website also.

Sure is quiet here, all the in-towners must be at the game! Sioux open up 7-0 on the opening possession with a Belmore passing TD to Wisthoff.

I've been meaning to add those forever because it's a pretty trivial extension. What really pushed me was the new My Yahoo! allowing RSS feeds as news sources; it's kind of weird seeing SiouxSports.com news on my My Yahoo! page, but I definitely like it For the techies, there is one current limitation in that the pubDates are a little funky (the times are all set to midnight and the date is the actual date of the article instead of the date it was published onto SiouxSports.com). That limitation is non-trivial because a lot of RSS readers rely on the accuracy of those dates to determine if anything is new (for example, if your reader checked already this morning, then I post a new article with a date of midnight today, the reader might not pick up on that as new). I have a plan to fix it -- the database has always actually kept track of article date and posting date separately, but to actually use the posting date in the RSS feed is going to require some pretty big work to the news management screens I use to determine what stories get displayed. The price you pay for not using off-the-shelf content management software, I guess.

What I haven't really seen anyone talk about is the effect the new obstruction crackdown could have on these games. Maine is supposedly this defensive power, but how clean do those defensemen play? Looking over their box score with VT, I see about 7 penalties that I would classify as obstruction-related. If the Sioux can apply more offensive pressure than VT did, frustration could lead to an increase in that. Don't get me wrong, penalties could be even making for a really boring game, or ND's big defensemen could end up on the wrong side of too many obstruction penalties. Regardless, it's not out of the question for 25+% of each game to spent on powerplay, which could certainly affect the outcome.

Virg picks the Black Bears

I can't believe no one has mentioned this former player yet... Johnstown, PA, Chiefs sign Chris Fournier

FYI - my notes about the UND section of the WCHA pre-season press conference can be found on my Sioux From Afar blog.

Eric Carlson maintains a list of links for ALL college hockey which covers that subject pretty thoroughly (including Rutgers). The links page started here because his list was offline for a while; I keep it up now because he doesn't keep as thoroughly up-to-date on D-I specifically (we have a lot of fan sites and so forth linked that he doesn't keep up on). That page was for hockey links only. The link to the football coach's show has been posted on the football front page each week as soon as I notice its refreshed to the most recent show. Thanks for all the feedback!

Though there were a few there I didn't have (but have added, thanks!), I can't let the shilling opportunity pass by: The most comprehensive and up-to-date set of D-I hockey links on the net is right here at SiouxSports.com: http://siouxsports.com/hockey/links.php

Well, color me surprised. I assumed from last week that any team that led another in both SSI and win% was automatically ranked higher. Apparently they weight the other factors a little higher than I thought (I had read them as being more-or-less tiebreakers) or my initial numbers need some tweaking.

Since it's not a poll, rather a mathematical rating system, it can produce counterintuitive results with limited or anomolous data. Winnowing previously noted caveats about Massey's ratings, the reason mathematical techniques have difficulty accurately comparing teams in the GLIAC to those from other conferences is because the GLIAC has such an insular schedule. The GLIAC has played only 3 games against outside opponents (3-0). The NCC has played 29 (22-7). If his were a strict win-loss rating system, it would have to treat the GLIAC as its own group because the lack of external losses makes it impossible to evaluate them relative to external teams. However, instead it uses margin of victory, which lets you produce a rating with sparser data, but which makes the rating a lot less obviously predictive (and thus is not allowed in the BCS). Regardless of technique, any objective evaluation of the strength of GLIAC relative to other conferences is based entirely on these three games: Ashland 48, St. Joseph's (IN) 7 Northwood 45, St. Joseph's (IN) 18 Findlay 40, Tiffin 21

That's certainly one possible scenario. Fortunately, despite your prescience, the games will still played on the field as scheduled. For example, there's a lot of NCC play left to assume that SCSU will win the conference. They didn't exactly look great on Saturday, either. UND has the potential to get some big SSI points from the teams UND92,96 listed (Ferris, USD, UNO), nice to get those >.700 wins. Depending how the GLIAC beats up on itself, it could certainly be possible to make the tournament with 2 losses, but not with that nice homefield advantage the Sioux love. We're all excited about the upcoming big game, but let's not invade every thread with smack; at least keep it confined to threads about the upcoming game and out of topical discussions.

I'm still figuring out how it all works and will be adding more of the tie-breakers, but here's some raw data on regional ranking estimation. Barring any major errors, looks like UND should be 5th-7th (my personal guess would be that Winona gets the bump above UND for the perfect DII record but Ferris St doesn't for just having played an extra game, putting UND in 6th). Next weekend's game will clearly have huge regional ranking implications.