jimdahl

I guess I shouldn't mention that in addition to being a U of M alum, I also had season football tickets as recently as two years ago and quite often spelled M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A. As history has now recorded, this website was up throughout that entire sordid time, so spelling MN doesn't necessarily fully convert you. In my defense, concessions at the Metrodome were always a big part of the event (not to mention Bloody Mary's at Bullwinkles before they let me in the dome).

I'm so confused, two Bison fans actually HELPING my & Sica's argument. So now that Tony's come around to agreeing that D-I is worried about bottom-feeders, I'm re-predicting that the solution will be enforced membership requirements to classify teams into the top two football divisions. I think real enforcement for D-IA attendance requirements is just around the corner and that some schools will be forcibly reclassified as D-IAA soon. The long-term problem is still there, as I described a page ago -- everyone is waterfalling up. Just as the top D-III schools have been climbing into D-II, all the former D-II powers have been fleeing them to D-IAA for the last 25 years. Without putting in some classification rules, the waterfall will continue and all those D-II schools will try to climb to D-IAA in 20 years. Therefore, I think attendance and/or budget requirements for D-IAA membership are also coming, just not as soon. I definitely don't see a moratorium on reclassification as the solution. It's a band-aid, and would only be temporary while a better solution (like attendance or athletics budget requirements) was being installed. A permanent moratorium would make the obviously incorrect assumption that every school is correctly classified now and that schools never change.

I've seen these mentioned quite a few other places, but not here. ESPN pundits predict Frozen Four outcomes, and UND nowhere to be seen. (<---- mock surprise, disclaimer for fans from other schools, clearly we all know UND isn't a favorite)

I won't repeat your mistake of generalizing fans of a particular school, and instead say that you specifically have no clue. NCAA hockey is the only NCAA tournament (that I know of) that's completely objective. The math is pretty simply and everyone knows exactly what it takes to make the tournament: a full season of top 16 PWR play. UND did it, UMD didn't.

Yeah, it's mathematical fact that Minnesota earned the right to play a cupcake more than any teams other than Cornell or CC. Of course, since there were only 2 cupcakes available, Minnesota did get lucky. Cornell got screwed for coming from a weaker conference and the desire to avoid interconference matchups. Maine could complain, but they always could have improve their draw by playing better in the regular season. Cornell won the NCAA regular season and still got the shaft, there was nothing more they could have done. Among the other #1 seeds, I don't see that UNH or CC should have many complaints.

The bonus adjustments to RPI for quality wins can actually easily push SCSU above Mankato. Unadjusted RPIs: SCSU: .5507 Mankato: .5528 Clearly it doesn't take much of a bonus to flip-flop those two on RPI (and PWR). .005 quality home, .003 quality neutral, and .001 quality home bonuses would be enough to put SCSU ahead of Mankato in PWR. The seeding of SCSU ahead of Mankato actually gives us a lot of insight into what the secret bonuses likely are

A few thoughts: * WCHA with 5 teams (woohoo!) * Ferris St is not going to be a cupcake for UND * The Gophers definitely got the easy draw -- hopefully our boys can make the 2nd round and extract a little revenge * I have the complete bracket posted now

As was conveniently posted on the SiouxSports.com hockey page, 5pm CT on ESPN (though possibly bumped to ESPN News if the war bumps a bball game from CBS to ESPN).

One other point I should make is that the "division 2" group in which I think UND and NDSU belong is the group of schools currently classified D-IAA. UND and NDSU should probably have both been D-IAA from the division's inception, but geographic considerations prevented it. My understanding is that schools like UND and NDSU in other parts of the country joined D-IAA immediately because they were surrounded by other D-IAA schools. We were surrounded by powerful D-II schools, so stayed in D-II. As athletics revenues have skyrocketed and travel costs fallen, it seems like we will eventually end up back with that group of schools that are, frankly, much more similar to UND and NDSU than the average D-II institution today.

There's a certain irony here that we've talked about before, but it bears repeating in this thread. We all agree that D-II is getting watered down by a bunch of lower-level schools moving up. Well, guess what? As the big D-II schools continue to flee to D-IAA, we're starting to upset big D-I schools by watering down their division. When D-IAA was formed, the financial incentives for lesser schools jumping to D-I were a very small fraction of what they are today. Now, D-II schools jumping to D-IAA eats directly into the big D-I schools' tv contract payouts. We know that the top D-IA schools are looking for solutions, as Sicatoka has pointed out. Unlike D-II, in which the lower schools can dominate the debate by sheer number of votes, the big D-I schools will dominate this debate because they generate all of the NCAA's revenue. Announcing "we're D-IAA now" doesn't make UND or NDSU have better athletics departments. D-II is becoming what D-III used to be. D-IAA is absorbing all of the old D-II powers and has scholarship limits similar to the old days of D-II. The divisions can have whatever names makes people happy, but as it all shakes out, NDSU/UND-like schools will continue to be in the 2nd division. Whether it's called D-IAA or D-II doesn't really matter much. The question is whether they'll fix the system so that schools can continue to play with similar schools in the future without having to climb into a newly formed division every 20 years. I honestly believe that hard, enforced attendance requirements to determine divisions are coming. If not, I'm sure they'll come up with some other mechanism to address the problem of everyone wanting a piece of the D-I money pie.

Though other NDSU fans have cited dramatic overcapacity in arenas as a positive for abilitiy to grow in the future, I'm willing to accept it as proof of irrational overbuilding. FYI, here's a comparison of stadium capacity/attendance/average %full for 2002-03 season. Though a ratio of arena capacity to population shows that G.F. has many more seats per person than Fargo, it looks to me like UND's facilities are being well used. That's why I question basketball/volleyball moving onto the main floor of REA. Having UND teams play in empty caverns is a bit of a break from the status quo. As far as a building "binge", UND hasn't really built a new athletics facility since the Winter Sports Center in 1972 (at least that I can think of). I think Sica hit the nail on the head with talk of broadcast capability/beer sales of REA (not to mention recruiting power). I guess it only makes sense to use that tremendous asset to provide as much benefit as possible to all of UND athletics, but I'm still philisophically not a huge fan of the University mega sports complex concept.

Starting hockey would have required a vote to raise taxes in Fargo to build a facility; NDSU tried desperately to add D-I hockey but Fargo voters turned them down in 1999. The difference in jumping to D-IAA is that it can be done without putting it to a vote in Fargo or statewide; any athletics budget shortfalls can just be drawn from general academic funds, which couldn't be done for the new stadium construction that hockey would have required. It's not a question of how is one affordable but the other not; rather, it's a question of from where is the money appropriated that makes one more feasible than the other. Back on topic -- IF UND ends up in a lower division than NDSU, I don't see why UND would have any interest in playing future football games in Fargo unless they were well compensated. UND is by far NDSU's biggest attendance draw, and going into a higher division team's home for a scholarship-imbalanced slaughter usually yields some payola. I'd welcome NDSU to come play in Grand Forks, but I'm not sure why they'd be interested in that (no home gate revenue, risk of being humiliated by a lower division team).

I don't like this at all. Going from independent facilities to a joint mega-sports-complex seems a step backwards to me. I know REA is the nicest athletics facility on campus, but I don't think that's a good reason to abandon all the other facilities and move all sports into it. At least you can't fit a football field in there...

Well, there you go. Like I said... 2-1 UMD, 5:07 remaining in the 3rd.

For those who don't have the TV coverage, UMD is getting ALL the chances and controlling the tempo. As the TV announcers just said, UMD actually looks like they're playing with some desperation. The Sioux either need to step it up or get really lucky.

I don't think he was talking about the fan ballot that includes anyone that can drum up a few fan votes. I believe he was referring to the ballot of Hobey Baker finalists, as selected by the coaches, which definitely does not include 0-point wonder Roberg.

While others have to be content with conference awards, Parise is a Hobey Baker finalist, the only freshman selected. Congrats!

While discussing the post-season with some friends in Madison last weekend, I made the claim that if the Sioux lost one more game our season was over. It was not a popular claim in the room and was met with mathematical rebuttals and suspicion of my loyalties My point was not the obvious, that a loss in the NCAA tourney clearly ends your season. Rather, a loss to Denver or in the WCHA tourney, while not necessarily mathematically season-ending, reveals that this team just doesn't have the spirit to get the needed wins against competitive opponents. I didn't see how UND could lose even one tournament game, and then turn it around to follow that up with a series of wins against tough opponents. I thought there was a chance that the Wisconsin series might have been a turning point to reenergize the team and give them some needed confidence and hunger. This loss tells me the team still isn't mentally ready to win games. Bad bounces, a questionable call, or hot goaltending can cost you a close game, but not 10 in two months. There's something else going on. In that same conversation, I predicted that this game of musical goalies would be what cost us that game that I claimed would end the season (questioning UND's coaching strategy also proved unpopular, for what it's worth). While it's not conclusive that musical goalies cost us the game last night (where was the offense?), it sure didn't save the game for us, either. I guess here's UND's chance to prove me wrong on my first point and grind out two revenge wins against Denver. It would sure surprise me.

Yeah, that's the defunct carryover from the NCC conference scheduling (done 4 years at a time). Just like NDSU and SDSU already have a full schedule of 2004 games against NCC opponents, many of which will be dropped.

The biggest source of unique visitor inflation is actually people who access the site from multiple locations. It's particularly a problem on a site like this where a single person is likely to check the board from work, from home, from a computer lab, etc... Since we track registered users, it's pretty easy to count an average number of unique IP addresses per registered user over a period of time (in aggregate) and adjust the stats accordingly. However, registered users are a self-selected group whose behavior probably isn't representative of those who haven't registered. In calling the unique visitors stat a "floor", I make the assumption that an average registered user is likely to access the site from MORE IP addresses than an average non-registered user, but certainly can't prove it. Back to your point, you can actually somewhat account for floating IPs by playing with the time window. Again, the site unapologetically uses cookies to track registered users as long as they stay on one computer. Further, most people who have a "dedicated" high speed connection lease their IP address for at least 14 days at a time. A lot of dialup users, though assigned unique IPs each time, are actually behind proxys that mask their IP address (all AOL users, for example, are aggregated down to just a couple unique users). Bottom line? Yes, lots of forces tug unique visitors in both directions. That's why most sites just report "hits", which I personally find a horrible measurement because it's directly influence by page design (number of elements per page)! I tend to compare unique visitors to visits to page requests and do a sanity check to make sure the numbers aren't crazy. For example, January had about 1.2m hits generated by 250,000 page views, which historically correlates well with about 10,000 unique visitors for this site.

I've been trying to stay out of this one, but... I have to agree that Taylor is talking good about making changes. While that's never a guarantee (at NDSU, UND, or anywhere), I agree that it appears to be taken seriously right now at NDSU. The concern I think a lot of people have is that it also appeared to be taken seriously in the previous two incidents in the past year. It's starting to seem to some of us that a few in the NDSU administration prefer to give the troublemakers free reign and then apologize afterwards rather than attempt to restrain those bad fans' behavior in advance. That same .1% of idiotic fans exists at every school, including UND. However, permitting that behavior (in spite of a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" admonishment) reflects poorly on the other 99.9% of fans who find it deplorable. I think a certain group of us fans are surprised because when similar incidents occur at UND (e.g. homecoming parade around '90), we're embarrassed and call for action because we don't want those idiots representing us. I guess we're all looking for some results to go along with the good intentions.

Mmmm.... I love talking stats, in any context. There are about 500 registered to post on the forums currently. That represents a small percentage of the total "lurkers". About 10,000 unique visitors per month generate about 1.2 million hits per month to SiouxSports.com (about half of those visit the message boards at least once). I don't have any current stats on total unique visitors over any longer periods of time. As I've often warned some of the more caustic posters, those numbers include a fair number of media, staff, coaches, players, and families, in addition to general fans. ** I should also mentioned that the unique visitors stat is probably a floor. Any roommates, computer lab users, family members, or coworkers who either share a computer or are behind a shared firewall or NAT router are counted as only a single unique visitor. That's why most web sites just quote the hits stat, which is absolute number of requests with no attempt to discriminate how many individuals were responsible for those requests.

Though you didn't ask me... My understanding was that next year (2003-04) is UNC's provisional year. It is supposed to intentionally include a mix of D-IAA and D-II opponents. Their first year for D-IAA tournament eligibility would then be 2007-08 (at one point the UNC FAQ on that issue stated that eligibility would begin in 2008-09, so apparently they were confused, too).

Thanks Kirk! As I promised, Kirk tries much harder than I do and the results show

Again, I don't really leave my seat and my digital camera is fully automatic, so not great photos. Here are a few shots from UW. These are just to whet the appetite, because I happen to know that the guy sitting next to me took like 50 photos (though again from the seat next to me). Hopefully I can get a few of those up soon if he feels like sharing. EDIT: KirkEisenbeis's links from below: KE's photos from UW KE's photos from the Duluth series