jimdahl

Though they're subjective qualities, most would say UND is in the top few teams in terms of arena niceness and long-term team competitiveness. I'm not in the camp that expects the NHL lockout to be good for college hockey. To the contrary, I think the NHL players are hurting hockey players' reputations and further putting hockey out of the minds of Americans. It won't matter in hotbeds like Grand Forks, but it could hurt hockey's national stature as a growing youth sport, which would in turn work to limit any nationalization of college hockey.

Things are running a little slow the past week or so, which probably makes you tempted to hit "submit" a second time which would result in a double-post. My thread hijack over -- back to students trying to get hockey tickets.

I made eerily similar musings back in the old DIAA forum, but also managed to come up with enough problems that I thought were showstoppers.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you're just feigning ignorance; for everyone else's benefit, none of those D-I opponents are in football, the sport in which UND didn't schedule NDSU because of prohibitive strength-of-schedule implications for tournament scheduling. The schools just don't play each other for now in football because it's not to both institutions' advantage; I'm sure someday soon it will be again and it will resume. Until then is there really anything new to say about it?

Massey's football ratings look a lot better interdivisionally now (not surprising, since last weekend featured a lot more interactions between divisions, including a few DII wins over DIAA). The top teams in IAA are bubbling up above the top of II, as they undoubtedly should be. UND still hanging strong at 120, #2 in DII.

My guess is someone was using a search engine on something related to the Archambault family, stumbled on the thread, and felt they could clarify the family relationship question raised in it. It certainly took me a minute of confusion to arrive at that conclusion.

m-w.com says:

In the interim, I'll include the link to the other school's free audio broadcast on the: football page I'll save my opinions of suspension of the UND audiocast for confirmation that it's true and not just another oversight (which seems to happen every year).

First, I'm not by any stretch a statistician -- I'm just interested in sports ratings and learned enough to implement the ratings on this site: (PWR, RPI, KRACH). However, analysis of variance strikes me as the wrong path because I tend to think of that as useful for comparing numerous factors between independent groups (though a Bison fan could use ANOVA to compare the power of the divisions to prove that they're really different!) Because Massey's technique uses scores rather outcomes, the model doesn't perfectly fit past results so it is derived via a maximum likelihood estimate, the best indiciation of error of which is the standard deviation (which Massey does provide). He says 68% of observed game results will fall within one deviation of the expected result.

Ignoring the sparseness problem for now, the link Sicatoka provided includes a brief description and links to more in-depth descriptions of the Bradley-Terry technique. It was developed independently in a few different instances to perform contest judging when a full round-robin isn't possible (e.g. dog show, or food competition). By including each entrant in a minimum number of pair comparisons and with no unconnected pockets in the comparison matrix, you can then use the technique to infer what would have happened had two uncompared items been compared. Of course, sporting events are performance-based so include an element of randomness that makes the technique non-perfect, but it's still a great place to start. The problem to which I think you were alluding is the sparseness issue I was describing earlier. We don't usually find the Bradley-Terry results to be predictive until each team has about 15 hockey games in the can (a good 25% of which are usually inter-conference, creating those crucial linkages). To compensate for the shortness of the football season and the desire for immediate ratings, Massey includes two additional techniques: starts with a base of last year's ratings (which diminishes in weight as real results come in), and uses scores to give more precision about team strength rather than just wins/losses (which also diminishes as more results come in, and which prevents those rankings from being part of the BCS because score-based ratings are considered sketchy by the NCAA).

Sorry, didn't mean to confuse the NDSU-educated. I don't share the opinion that all sports statistics, including Massey's ratings, are "useless garbage". Rather, I was just warning that we should bear in mind how ratings are formulated so we know what relative ratings actually mean. The one element of Massey's ratings that I forgot to mention was that it uses last season's results as a beginning baseline, so UND's rating is also being elevated for last season's performance.

I have the same problem with the Massey ratings now as I did last Spring -- the all-division matrix of game outcomes is way too sparse interdivisionally for meaningful analysis. Many of us Sioux fans start think about statistical ratings from a Bradley-Terry perspective: there are only about 20 interactions between the DII cluster of teams and the DIAA cluster of teams; those interactions are also overwhelmingly won by DIAA so you can't form a win-tie path from each team to each other. Massey attempts to work around that sparseness problem by not just analyzing wins/losses, but the score of each contest. UND was a team that, famously, last year played to the level of each opponent, yet they still managed to win; is a team that runs up the score really better? Massey does correct for that with what he calls a Bayesian Correction, which basically reduces the importance of score differential as more win-loss information becomes available. Right now, when win-loss information is sparse, UND is being rewarded massively for blowing out Mesa State. As more win-tie connections are made throughout the matrix, the scores will become less important and Massey's ratings will come to resemble Bradley-Terry, though there will always be the score differential kludge linking parts of the matrix that aren't naturally linked by a win-tie path.

If you're upset about something happening on another message board, please address it there -- do not drag it over here. Come here whenever you want to discuss Fighting Sioux Football. Regarding UND's strength of schedule so far, Mesa St. was UND's only regular season loss last year and was #23 in the AFCA poll and Don Hansen's rankings before this week. Delta St was #10 in the d2football poll and #14 in Don Hansen's rankings before playing the Sioux. We can't help it that playing the Sioux makes opponents look bad

Yawn. It seems to me the Forum had as many articles about UND's football game as it always has, which is frankly the same coverage the Grand Forks Herald gives to higher small-division out-of-town NDSU. The Forum's market is full enough of UND fans that I don't think any need worry about difficulty getting UND news. If you think your team should get more press coverage, it's up to the team to make itself newsworthy.

Opening day record for UND at the Alerus with official attendance of 10,613! Way to show up for the quality competition!

Mmm... memories of 2003, we just can't put together 4 quarters. Sioux give it away on an interception to give the Statesmen the chance to win. Sioux with an INT at their own 43 with 1:19 to go. Once again, last minute heroics. It's going to be another heart attack season.

21-9, Delta State got the TD they needed heading into half time (though missed the PAT). 0:54 left in the first half. I think the announcers just said Saginaw lost to Northwood! Ouch.

There's no doubt that supply creates demand. You see it in all spectator sports -- when teams do better, they sell more tickets. Of course, to even have the potential to draw large crowds, the sport has to be in the small core set that are "fan-friendly" (e.g. football, basketball, volleyball, hockey, lacrosse come to mind). UND is far more dominant in swimming than hockey, yet it doesn't draw the crowds.

I know where I read it first... we've all been predicting it here all along. That UND won't tolerate being in a lower division from NDSU in the long run is so obvious it's barely conversation worthy.

No doubt UND's scheduling in the past few years hasn't convinced the casual fan to get excited about opening day, yet the fans have shown up pretty consistently. Openers in the Alerus: 2001 10396 vs. UM-Crookston 2002 9277 vs. UM-Crookston 2003 9253 vs. UM-Crookston The potential attendance drawback to scheduling a competitive opponent for the opener is that a loss could lead to diminished fan interest; but I certainly think its better for the team to jump right into tougher competition. As a fan, I'd certainly rather see them play competitive games than win easy games. I'm excited about this opener because I feel like I'm actually going to learn about the team, whereas it was always hard to take much away from the Crookston games.

I'm pretty much with you. Though I think the number of campuses in the NDSUS is a tad high for such a small state, it provides some flexibility to UND. Those other campuses are targeted to ensure that all North Dakotans get access to higher education which gives UND some breathing room to trade off accessibility for excellence. UND has always done a great job of being a regional alternative to the non-TC Minnesota campuses, but has also done a good job of recruiting nationwide (20.3% of student body from outside ND/MN as of 2003-04. While UND's mission is definitely to serve North Dakota, it may best accomplish that by bringing in outside people/ideas/money and then focusing on applying those resources to educate local undergraduates and professionals. Some of this is probably cultural or insitutional and shifts as the quality of students shift. Part of it is getting great faculty. The good news is that UND has been working very hard to bring faculty salaries up: as a percent compared to peers and as actual dollars.

UND is holding pretty constant in tier 3 of National Universities, where it's been for many years. While all such rankings are rather arbitrary and showing up in tier 3 doesn't exactly beat a path to UND's door, it's nice to see UND does stack up relatively well against our regional and athletics peers. There may also be some hints that UND is outgrowing the NCC, by this measurement anyway. Other schools of interest (culled manually, omissions unintentional): WCHA #32 UW #66 UMN #90 DU #33 CC (liberal arts) NCC 3rd tier USD Recent NCC 3rd tier SDSU 4th tier NDSU 4th tier UNC

More on the Alerus Center's financial state:

Newsweek interviews Ed Schultz

I would be cautious using claims like "old NCC" and "new NCC" when counting championships. The success of some teams in the NCC inherently creates lack of success for others due to the nature of scheduling. The top teams in the conference had their records hurt by playing each other in the regular season and having to face each other in regional tournaments. There's no way to know how many NCAA championships the "new NCC" would have if NDSU had never been a conference member; though it seems quite likely that 14 is a floor, not a ceiling. More to the point, I consider not having football to be a huge detriment to the prestige of a conference. It is indisputably the most popular college sport. I think a school with 10 football championships is much more visible as a strong athletics school than a school with 30 championships in track, swimming, and wrestling. Anyone can feel free to point out how many of SSC's championships were in basketball (the other highly visible sport), since I'm too lazy to research it myself. I'm still not convinced at SSC being an upgrade (except for in terms of weather, which is indisputable).