jimdahl

I was at the game, too, and I think the shot count was pretty accurate. The Sioux owned the 3rd period. It got to the point that Mavs fans were cheering when they cleared the zone (5 on 5). I'm a little surprised UND got off 17 in the 2nd because it felt like MSU was getting continuous odd-man rushes, which was the only time I remember thinking they were getting off lots of shots. One thing that may trick people not accustomed to the stats of the game is that MSU fired a lot of pucks to the side of the net, which don't count as shots. As far as criticizing Ranfranz, everyone messes up, and I think he did last night. There were a few ugly rebounds he gave up, at least one of which directly resulted in a goal. MSU had some quality goals, such as the top-shelfer on the two on one; but on the other hand, Jensen made the save on a nearly identical shot on the other side of the rink. You can't necessarily say Ranfranz lost that game, but I also think he didn't do anything to win it. It's nothing personal -- he got the second start because he had a great game on Friday. I just think he didn't play very well Saturday.

I believe there is no TV coverage because Mankato doesn't televise it's games (road games are only televised when we can get a feed from the home team).

I was in Mankato that night but not the next. Of course, the next night was a 6-1 victory. I'm going to *try* to swoop into Mankato for one of the games this weekend. If we split, it'll be my fault and you'll know which night I managed to make it As much as this series has been overhyped by Mankato, it's pretty key to the Sioux. Like PCM said, 0 or 1 points pretty much kills any playoff momentum we might have been able to build. Generally in these situations, they overhypedness in Mankato should work to the visitor's advantage. Of course, even if true, that would still require UND to show up and play to win. Sounds like Ranfranz get the start tonight. Should be a good one.

From Dean Blais (via Virg Foss): Hear that Mankato? You should WANT to lose now so you don't have that annoyingly tempting streak hanging over you.

As expected, no decision was made but the leaning was unfavorable about accepting NDSU/SDSU.

So, to bring the thread back around to the topic: How will Big Sky's reaction affect UND? I've personally always thought it was about a 90%+ chance of Big Sky saying, "thanks, but the time isn't right, now," so I'll focus on that potential response. That could be a bit of a stumbling block to SDSU because they HAVE to find a conference affiliation to move. If they don't find one by the end of the summer, they may not resign from the NCC this season and would no longer be on the same timetable as NDSU. In that situation, NDSU may explore Gateway/MidContinent/independent (I wonder if SDSU is allowed to join a conference that's not all-sport?) Those schools being in a weaker conference position actually makes it more likely that UND could easily choose to join NDSU and/or SDSU at any time, but is not likely to provide UND a compelling case to move. Particularly if NDSU ended up independent and SDSU couldn't move, I can't imagine UND would find that attractive. On the other hand, I think that NDSU and/or SDSU being accepted to Big Sky would be long-term positive for UND moving up. Though UND likely wouldn't be able to follow NDSU as easily in the short term, NDSU's position would be a much more compelling long-term draw. Further, Big Sky would be stacked with 1-2 more schools interested in adding Dakota teams than it is now. As a fan wanting UND to move up, I guess I'm cheering for the (unlikely?) acceptance of NDSU/SDSU into Big Sky. On the other hand, things will change so much in the next 5-10 years (2004, Montana DIA?, etc...) that any such analysis is inherently short-sighted.

More fun scoring stats: 1st Period Lead UND leading after 1st Period, 13-2-0 Mankato trailing after 1st, 5-3-5 UND's trailing after 1st, 2-4-3 Mankato leading after 1st, 3-2-1 Scoring First UND scores first, 15-1-1 Mankato's opponent scores first, 7-5-8 UND's opponent scores first, 7-5-3 Mankato scores first, 7-2-1 And a few more of my favorites: * UND outshoots opponent, 22-3-2 * UND is outshot by opponent, 0-3-2 * UND gives up 3 or fewer goals, 19-1-1 (both the tie and loss were Denver last weekend) Shoot often and score early to win, who knew?

The NCAA announced the seeding plan for the expanded hockey tournament: The biggest change seems to be that they're no longer going to swap seeds, but simply rotate identically seeded teams between regions to meet their goals.

I have to disagree with this technical assessment. DNS servers don't just "screw up". All they do is look up a domain name and return an IP value from a table. If the value they return is not what the domain name owner intends it's either because the system was hacked (someone managed to get bad DNS info to propagate) or someone really messed up. Given that the address didn't just fail but was redirected to a porn site, I'd say it's most likely that it was the intentional work of "hackers". I do agree that the alleged hackers probably weren't attacking POI specifically (not exactly a trophy for hackers) but probably just redirected a large subnet that happened to include POI.

Unfortunately, we'd need to get FB attendance up to about 17,000 to go D-IA instead of just D-IAA. That's far more realistic, though, than attracting Big Ten attention, for which you'd either have to have a history of a top football program (e.g. Notre Dame) or attendance up to about 50,000 and school size up to about 35,000. Don't worry, though, Big Ten hockey is something that only seems realistic to those wishful Bison fans who take delight in things that hurt UND athletics (browse any Bison-frequented board around the time they all misunderstood the hockey autobid situation for examples of the people I'm talking about). It's discussed to death on USCHO, so I won't go into all the reasons, but Big Ten won't form a hockey conference with the 5 current members and probably wouldn't really be interested until about 8 had hockey. That's not happening any time soon.

This is on topic because I mentioned the Rob/Brooks Bollinger tie Bollinger invited to NFL Scouting Combine from the Wisconsin State Journal. Highlights include:

Hmm... didn't mean to out anyone. I guess all the posts in which you talk about SDSU were your classic fights with Husby in the D-IAA forum At least I didn't say anything about that time the CIA sent us to Cuba to kill Castro. SDSU is now an ACHA D-III team. Their games actually get pretty good coverage in the Collegian. Clearly someone on the staff there is a fan of the team.

Speaking of PCM's college days, you might like this column on hockey from the Collegian.

Bayda can score all he wants tonight, as long as Jagr scores 1 more. :O Anyway, here's what the Canes have to say about him:

I had a brief explanation of the reasoning behind the skin change in the Admin Forum. That the new skin doesn't yet include a UND logo in the masthead is arbitrary and not at all related to any requests from UND. In fact, our IP attorney worked out a common understanding of "fair use" of descriptive logos with UND's licensing company about two years ago. Follow up in the admin forum if necessary.

Just for some historical perspective: 2003 Jan 1-Feb 10 4-4-2 (losses to UMN, CC, MTech) 2000 Jan 1-Feb 10 4-4-2 (losses to UW, UMN, SCSU) 1997 Jan 1-Jan 26 5-3-0 (losses to SCSU, UW, CC) 2002 Golden Gophers Jan 1-Feb 3 5-4-2 What's fooling us this year is that this was almost the best UND has ever done before Christmas.

It's true that I was assuming that UND would do well enough in its remaining games to stay in either the West or Midwest. It's certainly not guaranteed.

I honestly cannot figure out INCH's methodology for their "4x4": * How does SCSU with a #8 PWR not make the field at all, while Michigan (#12) and Michigan State (#17) do? * Ferris sent East as a #3 seed (I guess the thought it that Michigan St will be more of a draw than Ferris in Ann Arbor)? If they're trying to predict the future (SCSU is going to slump out of the tournament), fine, but that is NOT how the tournament would be seeded if the season ended today. The only sure things are: IF Michigan makes it, they will play in Michigan. IF Minnesota makes it, they will play in Minnesota. Our best hope would be to be sent to Ann Arbor to play in a field that doesn't include Michigan or Michigan State (quite possible, at this point). We seem destined to be in a bracket with at least one WCHA team if we make the tournament.

I feel sorry for Josh for what Goon is about to say.... This series and CC's success this weekend pretty much guarantee we can't hit 1st. However, this season is FAR from over. One can't forget the example of Minnesota last year. This is our first loss to a team not at the top, and frankly, MTech is no cupcake -- they're a TUC right now with a win against SCSU and ties against Minnesota and CC. Hopefully these last two weeks are teaching a lesson. We have to work for every win, they're not guaranteed because of our success in previous games. 2nd is still ours to lose.

Marsh was talking to UND, UNK, Colorado State, and UNC. As far as I can see he didn't sign with any of them, so I'm not sure what's happening with him. It would've been nice to expand the Colorado recruiting pipeline a little this year.

It will be very tough to catch CC because they get the 2 H2H points. We would need them to lose enough of the remaining games that we caught them on RPI, TUC, and COp. However, getting the PWR points back from Maine & BC (each of whom are only ahead of us by 1 comparison point) shouldn't be too tough if we manage to win some of these upcoming games. Denver and Mankato are both TUCs (teams under consideration) so if we win enough of those, we should be able to take that point and win the comparison against Maine & BC. If MTech falls off as a TUC (they are currently last) that could give our PWR a little blow. We have a pretty favorable schedule remaining in terms of TUC -- we play a couple teams under consideration, but not near the top (so hopefully a little more beatable).

There was never much of a chance of the WCHA losing its bid. It was just an issue of the impact of some rules not being properly understood when the rules were formed, so now exceptions have to be written in. However, in the long term UND should pay attention to the NCAA's bias favoring multi-sport conferences. As hockey continues to grow it could align more along multi-sport conference lines and UND could find it difficult to play at the top level of hockey if it's not top-level in other sports. That said, I think the possibility of a DI NCC is quite low (unfortunately). USD is out. Rumors have swirled for years that UNC didn't feel it was a good geographic fit in the NCC and that may have been part of why they moved to D-IAA. SDSU's requirement that they not move without a conference could hinder their participation, also. We had a thread a ways back discussing the composition of a possible new conference (though it fell apart when bombarded with the tired anti-UND campaigns that seems to invade every thread in this topic). I personally really wanted the DIAA NCC because it would have been by far the cheapest route for all the schools involved (maintain current geography for low travel costs and maintain rivalries to keep the gate revenue up through a tough transition time). Unfortunately, not enough schools wanted to move back when it was feasible (UND was among the nays). It's quite irksome because a move in the future will be much less practical and more difficult than participating in an NCC move.

Not to give MTech any bulletin board fodder, but Zach pledged a sweep to the Dakota Student:

Standardization would only be a good thing. Can you imagine if UND had a 150-yd football field because it liked to develop a long passing game, or a wider basketball court because it favored faster players? Such variations would take away from the sport. The only reason that college hockey doesn't have a standardized playing surface is because it's an immature sport; frankly, this sort of lack of development holds the sport back. That said, no one should be expected to retrofit existing rinks, but I would welcome a policy that required that future rinks be built to a common specification. It was just in the 90s that the "suggestion" came down that all future rinks should be built Olympic size, but that didn't really take. I think the sport is grown up enough that the NCAA can lay down an actual rule to eventually ensure that hockey has a standard surface. In my opinion, standardizing on the dimensions used by the NHL would be smartest because it would help college hockey be a farm for the NHL and provide for the best growth of the sport; however, my argument in this area is far less impassioned than my argument that the playing surface NEEDS standardization.

INCH has an article on the same topic that talks more about how the WCHA is already pursuing an exemption. Again, doesn't matter because the WCHA will almost certainly always send its champion now that the field is 16, but it's quite a black eye on the conference.