jimdahl

For those who weren't around then, here are Pat's photos from the event (at the bottom, below the Final Five photos).

This site is directed at people interested in Sioux athletics. Frankly, I haven't seen much demand from those people to permit trolling; rather people regularly express gratitude for a moderated forum in which they can discuss the Sioux without being overwhelmed by childish arguments and denigration from Sioux-haters. If the topic of this site doesn't interest you, the sites you listed are all great places to discuss NDSU athletics. bisonville.com even has a section devoted to bashing the Sioux, where it will be much better received than it would be here.

I always said the Gophers getting 3-4 points THIS weekend would prove something to me. We'll tell you what we think of the Badgers on Feb. 8.

I love to see WCHA teams beat Michigan, Mich. St., UNH, as long as they then lose to the Sioux. The curse of the #1 PWR aside, it's nice to play those 4 seeds in the tournament, especially with the expansion (though it's then that much more gut-wrenching to lose).

I was picturing a bunch of bulky German guys named Frank building REA. As a long-time contractor, you'd think he would have known to use local union labor or fear the wrath of Gopher fans.

In NCC looking for right fit, Mike Marcil indicated that the NCC isn't actively courting any new members and won't add an inappropriate member just to move from 7. The interesting news was: He also quashd the ridiculous rumor:

On Saturday you can join the alumni party at the Grand Slam Sports Bar (in the Hyatt) at 1000 H street N.W. ($10 cover, 8:05 ET). The parties in D.C. drew a decent crowd last time I was at one. I had success getting the Crystal City Sports Pub to tune in a playoff game for me once on one t.v., but we had promised them a few people and there were no other interesting events on at the time. I think their big limitaton was that they could only tune a certain number of satellite programs in at a time, so were hesitant to consume one for North Dakota hockey.

I definitely agree with that, but having to reduce it to the 6-1-2 is a whole lot less impressive than the 11-1-2 that I keep hearing as evidence of how hot the Gophers are. Like I said, the Gophers have established themselves as being somewhere in the top 5 in the conference by manhandling the lower tier; where they are in the top 5 remains to be seen by how they handle the top tier (which they haven't had the opportunity to do, yet). Admittedly, averaging ratings is a very dubious concept, which you definitely helped demonstrate by dropping a few of the outliers and dramatically affecting the result. The point I think I somewhat successfully made, though, is that despite being on a roll, it's a roll against significantly weaker competition than UM will face in the next month and a half. Mariucci is always a tough place to play (no sweep yet for UND) and the Gophers will be pumped up for a critical rivalry game, yet I think UND has to objectively be the favorite. Of course, getting 3-4 points from UND would change UM's outlook quite a bit. (Remember, I did pick UMN to squeak into 2nd in my what-if )

He's either been reading too much USCHO or is just plain ignorant about the sport. UND has the toughest schedule in the country by the most followed measures (RPI Opp%, RPI Opp-Opp%, and KRACH SOS). Every team has to play some lesser opponents, that's just the way schedules go, but if we're looking for a team that has derived much of its heft from cupcakes, I uncovered one while digging through the schedules for my post above: UMN ---- vs. 1-10 KRACH: 3-8-1 vs. other 48 KRACH: 10-0-2 UND --- vs. 1-10 KRACH: 11-2-2 vs. other 48 KRACH: 6-0-0 As I said above, perhaps UMN really has improved during their winning streak, but putting up 7-1 against MTech, Mankato, CC, and AA only proves that UMN is probably top 5 in the conference, it doesn't show us where in the top 5. Fortunately for the Gophers, they have every opportunity to prove their case with remaining conference series against UND, UW, UMD, AA, Denver, and SCSU (all top 10 KRACH).

Are the Gophers that good right now? Maybe, but there's certainly no evidence that they are. Sure, they're on an 11-1-2 streak, but against whom? In that 11-1-2 streak, UMN's average opponent is ranked 24.6 by KRACH. That streak included only 3 games against top 10 opponents, in which the Gophers went 2-1-0. Preceding that streak, the Gophers played opponents with an average KRACH ranking of 8.4, in which they posted a record of 2-7-1. Bottom line is that the Gophers have "gotten hot" when they started facing weak opponents. Maybe that's just a coincidence and the Gophers really have gotten better with the return of Ballard/Harrington and apparent improvement from Briggs, but their record against bottom-tier opponents is hardly evidence of it. What will happen now that they're out of cupcakes? That's why they play the games

The fan portion of the voting is not really about who is the best player, it's not even a popularity contest -- it simply reveals the most popular player on the school that could get the most of its fans to vote. Honestly, did you vote for who you thought were the best players in college hockey, or your favorite UND players? Apparently a lot more Alabama-Huntsville fans have registered for "Vote for Hobey" than UND fans; usually such anomolies are the result of massive "get out the vote" efforts on message boards/web sites. Every now and then you see a school promote voting on their official web site, which can create a massive spike of voters. Regarding Ross specifically, it's common to see a big voting block when a school that's not one of the traditional superpowers has a big star (like Ferris St last year). Frankly, the Pts/G stat is probably a lot more meaningful than Pts, so Ross is a legitimate contender.

You can't tell a story like that without including the link

Every now and then someone takes a flash photo, which result in an odd moment of light

Echo... echo... echo...

And a few more what-if stats for the geeks. The most commonly picked road/home sweeps are interesting.

Prepare to be shocked... USA weekend illustration contains word 'nigger' Fear not, you can still get all that valuable USA Weekend content without offensive illustrations from the USA Weekend Site

One of my favorite parts of this is definitely seeing what people predict (except for a few trouble-makers who try to come up with a 10-way tie, thereby skewing the results). Here's the breakdown of this weekend's picks for the WCHA.

Apparently I was too diplomatic with "isolate the arena from the fickle political machinations of the University."

More effects of CAFTA on ag from the GF Herald. Highlights for sugar:

Before I saw this thread, I saw today that it is linked from the SI front page. Pretty cool pulse of sports fan in N.D. North Dakotans weigh in on sports #1 sport of North Dakotans -- UND hockey. Was there any doubt? #1 most hated sports figure by North Dakotans -- Favre. It's funny, not living near North Dakota anymore, I always feel like I'm the only person in the world who hates Favre; the rest of the world seems to love him. I was grinning ear to ear when his (now) typical choking-by-interception knocked them out of the playoffs. #1 sports enemy of North Dakotans -- Minnesota. Gee, it's not that NDSU-SDSU rivalry/lovefest #1 North Dakota athlete -- Roger Maris. I'm a little surprised Kleinsasser made this list, but I guess he is fresh in people's minds

They used to give us those when I had student season tickets to Gopher football. They included such original suggestions as yelling "Gophers" at the end of the Star Spangled Banner, which we all dutifully ignored. It also included the spelling of M-i-n-n-e-s-o-t-a so we had a fighting chance of all spelling it right after TDs. Honestly, I've always thought it would be cool if everyone at UND knew "Fight On Sioux" and sang along.

That's what I, personally, find fascinating about sitting down and looking at the actual games remaining and assigning points. If you'd just asked me to come up with a ranking without considering the games, I probably would've had UMN a little lower, CC and AA a little higher. However, when I actually had to assign 4 points per game to one team or another for the remaining games, I was a little surprised by my own prediction.

One quick reminder, saving is smart so you can revisit how your picks result in a conference finish as real results come in (your picks for games that have passed are replaced with the actual results). The other nice thing that does is let us create some aggregate statistics, the prediction of the people, if you will.

Call me homer, but UND does seem to be in the drivers seat yet again (though we all know how that ended last year). Why wait for the games to be played, I can tell you how it will end: UND 42 UMN 36 UW 34 UMD 33 SCSU 32 AA 26 CC 26 Denver 26 Mankato 17 MTech 8 Q: Wait Jim, are you sure you got that right? CC and Denver in the bottom half? A: The numbers don't lie. It's the year of the Minnesota teams. Q: The Gophers overtaking the Badgers, really? A: Have you been paying attention at all lately? Q: AA is so scrappy, are you sure they won't finish over .500? A: Honestly, I felt like I was searching for extra points to give them. Maybe they'll surprise me. Feel good story of the year. Lots of goals from Jim Dahl. Q: It's not that I don't trust you, Jim, but I'd kind of like to see the numbers for myself A: What-if calculator Q: I heard this thing is full of bugs? A: Nah, I declare it ready for human consumption. I fixed the numerous known bugs last week with two exceptions: it doesn't deal well with trying to load your saved picks in between games of a series (e.g. on Saturday afternoon); it still just gives conference standings, not tournament seedings (i.e. WCHA-specific tournament seeding tiebreakers are not programmed in).

It is true that moving to the new IP address broke everyone's cookies, forcing everyone to login again. However, it shouldn't affect persistence of cookies. FYI-- they'll all break again when/if we rebind the SiouxSports.com domain name to the new or old IP address for the board. At this point I'm still tweaking settings during peak periods to determine if the new server can really handle the peak load. Anyway, if you have to login every time, there's a cookie storage problem on your end, because the forum cookies try to persists for 365 days.