jimdahl

I agree that this season is shaping up to come down to the conference tournament. Once upon a time, I used to run charts of the possible final conference standings, but it's a lot harder than it sounds and people really quite caring as much about conference standings predictions once PWR became better understood. I don't know what it would take to dust off that old calculator, but some quick playing with whatif and looking at upcoming weekends is interesting: * To overtake UMD, UND needs to gain 8 points on them. Even if UND swept out its last 4 and UMD got swept out its last 4, UND would still need at least 2 this weekend to catch UMD. * To overtake CC, UND only needs to gain 4 on them. Once again, the head-to-head with CC is going to be the real driver. Assume a UND sweep there, to be generous, and UND still needs to play at least as well vs. UMD and Michigan Tech as CC will against Minnesota and Denver. Overtaking Wisconsin is also possible by gaining 8 on them, but with no head-to-head, that's less in UND's control. UND has to get some points at home this weekend to stay in control of its own destiny.

IMHO, same as the Vikings game, the team with more talented individual players was seriously outcoached. Way to go Saints. Great game, and no question as to who deserved the win. I, too, hope Favre comes back. His 2020 commercial was one of the best.

I noticed Bemidji St's interesting position for the first time today while looking at UND's comparison. Bemidji PWR Comparison Details It's not clear that TUC is ever going to come into play for them, with only 7 games vs current TUCs and none scheduled (a shame, too, because they've got a great TUC record). Because of that, about half their comparisons are on the basis of RPI only. They need to win at least 6 of their remaining 8 to end the regular season without a noticeable drop in RPI (Bemidji RPI details). If they went just under .500, they could drop about 10 spots and out of the field. Of course, their remaining schedule isn't exactly a bear...

Ask and ye shall receive. One more bye week and the Sioux could have a #1 seed. In all seriousness, looking back at the games to watch from the blog post, literally everything went UND's way: * Northern Michigan took 3 of 4 from Ferris St * Alaska took 3 from Michigan St * Wisconsin beat Michigan * Denver/CC swept Mercyhurst/Air Force

You're falling into the same statistical trap as Detroit In all seriousness, I usually ignore the conspiracy theories because they're a waste of time to refute, but they also usually come from far less reputable circles... so, I will take this opportunity to refute the implied nickname-based litmus test (as redwing well knows ).

I actually enjoy the bye week quite a bit -- it's much easier to see the effects of other teams' games on UND when UND isn't playing. Blog post -- PWR Forecast (includes season's first attempt at "games to watch")

Sorry, though we have communicated with the people involved, we probably should have made a general post because a lot of people have noticed that some posts have been removed from this thread. Posts that are defaming in regard to people's private lives (even for public figures) are not permitted. nodak is absolutely right that whatever personal issues anyone has with some public figures is not a suitable topic for discussion.

Just to clear up any misconceptions... this board is private. We choose to let anyone read it because we think that allows it to provide the best service to UND athletics, but to post requires agreeing to abide by the forum terms and rules. Those terms and rules were also constructed with the goal of best serving UND athletics. To that end, they encourage different points of view (e.g. explicitly permitting people to criticize a team), but explicitly prohibit some particularly destructive behaviors that have proven to make the board a less welcoming place (e.g. personal attacks and defamation). We've tried to gather a lot of input about how you all think the forum can best do that and foster a UND fan community, and the rules are the product of that feedback over the years. We're always willing to have discussions like this in this forum. The rules are subject to change as the culture and legal environment of the forum changes, but abiding by them is a requirement for posting.

ESPN story

I was drinking Miller Lite last night. Today I'm stepping it up to Sam Adams Noble Pils. That better do it, because I'm not sure I can afford to switch up to Sammy Smith.

Actually thought you might not be serious at first, but couldn't really detect a joke in there anywhere, so figured why not answer

Sort of like a mix between a blog and a chat, but your messages are really limited -- can only be like 140 characters or so. You can search all of twitter to see what everyone's saying about a particular topic: Twitter Or you can view everything a specific person has said: UND Hockey's twitter GF Herald Hockey twitter Because everyone who uses Twitter is posting their messages to one place, it's easy for you to make a list of people you want to follow and see all of their messages in a single feed. I try to aggregate all the twitter feeds related to UND sports onto the front page of SiouxSports in the lower right. You'll often see people post something new to twitter a couple minutes before it makes it into any blogs or news stories, if seeing news ASAP is your thing.

Yeah, I notice with their twitter accounts the athletic dept. has been competing with Brad to try to get the lines up first the last few weeks. With a 12 minute lead this week, they posted: Defense: 1. MacWilliam-Blood 2. LaPoint-Marto 3. Fienhage-Gleason Goalies: Dell-Eidsness Hockey by UNDMHockey on Jan 29, 2010 06:22:00 PM Forwards: 1. Gregoire-VandeVelde-Frattin 2. Trupp-Malone-Kristo 3. Knight-Zajac-Rowney 4. Bruneteau-Lamoureux-Toews Hockey by UNDMHockey on Jan 29, 2010 06:21:37 PM Corban Knight back in the lineup tonight, Aaron Dell likely to start in goal. Hockey by UNDMHockey on Jan 29, 2010 06:20:58 PM

Still feeling good about how well the simulator seems to be working, a prediction of Minnesota for our Gopher friends: A sweep guarantees staying a TUC. A split makes staying a TUC very likely. Don't get swept.

If only I had waited until Monday, then I would have gotten it right Anyway, now that it's correctly forecasting backward, I'm actually quite a bit more confident in its results looking forward. Here's a chart: And here are the key games: Merrimack over New Hampshire Ohio State over Ferris State (sweep is a much bigger bump than a split) St Cloud St over CC (sweep is a much bigger bump than a split) Michigan over Mich St. Mass. losing to BU and Providence For those most part those look like RPI flips UND PWR Details

I wish I could say what went wrong with that first run, but I don't really know. Here's what the forecast should have been:

Thanks! Added them to the photos page. There were actually quite a few from this weekend, 6 sets so far.

Jan 22, 2010 Darren Jensen played 890 minutes for the Sioux in 1979-80. HockeyGoalies.org Jan 23, 2010 North Dakota gained statehood in 1889 (six years after UND was founded) Jan 24, 2010 Have a question for the UND library? Call Reference and Research at the Chester Fritz at 1-888-557-7117, ext. 2. UND Library Services

Well, as I warned, I didn't have full confidence in that chart. Either something was quite wrong with it, or some very improbable outcomes really benefitted UND. I should be able to find out by digging through the predictions and comparing to the outcomes early this week. UND at #10 in PWR

anecdote -- the past few years I've had to temporarily upgrade SiouxSports's capacity twice a year: for the away Wisconsin games and March-end of season. This year, the forum buckled under the load of the away Denver games for the first time. Haven't had such unexpected traffic that things went down in at least a couple years, now.

thanks for the updates, Shawn

Finally managed to get the PWR forecaster up and running. Consider this a test run, as it really is the first time I've gotten it working this year, and there really may be something wrong. If this is right, UND basically needs to sweep to avoid falling.

Yeah, I was just chatting with someone else about this via email. As I assured him, it's still a logically sound premise that all other things equal an NC game is more important than if the game were a conference game because the NC game contributes in a smaller COP pool (or paraphrasing his words, there are more opportunities to make up for a conference loss than an NC loss). This outcome doesn't break that assumption, it just shows how easy it is for all other things not to be equal. In this case, I'm guessing that Minnesota manages to flip as many COP comparisons as Cornell. I'm still quite convinced that NC games are always more important than conference games because each one carries more individual weight in COPs, but I am starting to wonder if in reality that effect is so small that it doesn't matter much. This stuff does eventually sink in. I was pleased to see Brad manage to slip this into Rare visitor on tap (GF Herald): (for any relative newcomers who made it this far who don't know to what I'm referring, in this post I attempted to demonstrate that the NCAA's misguided '07 change to RPI simply served to weaken the importance of strength-of-schedule, which was definitely not the stated intent.)

Following up on a couple previous posts from this year... When to start looking at PWR? (a data-based look at when PWR stabilizes) First look at PWR contributor — non-conference records (in which I wonder aloud whether non-conference games matter as much more as we all think they do) I just finished my first genuinely useful PWR analysis of the season: PWR impact of Minnesota games vs. Cornell games In that particular case (which is truly a single scenario that can't necessarily be extrapolated to answer the larger question), the games against Cornell prove no more important to North Dakota's current PWR ranking than the Minnesota games. An interesting, though not shocking, conclusion.

Darcy Mitani. I overlapped with all four of his years at UND, 92-96, one of the fan favorites of that era. One of the pretty talented players on the underachieving teams of that stretch. Scored 112 points in his career.