jimdahl

TD UND. Landry to Konrath. Aggies are begging for a holding call.

In honor of wounded vets (I assume associated with Veterans Day this week). Maryland had similar jerseys and camo earlier.

Goska in (claim the Davis guys who have been wrong about this before...)

1st and goal inside the 1.

Ugh. 2nd and 1yd on the Sioux 6.

Interesting, the Davis announcers said Landry was at QB -- it was actually Goska?

Landry to the 1 yd line on 3rd down. 4th and inches. Going for it! TD!!

Brad says no Marvin

Punting had been the bright spot of the 1st quarter, until that last one...

TD UC-Davis

UC Davis audio is free, no registration required, uses QuickTime UC Davis Audio

Or from Bob's link above: ">" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344">

Look like it's $7.

UC Davis a win away from Great West football title

This time it's not even my fault OTHER people brought up sports statistics, but they were using them wrong. I even tried to ignore that and let it go, but then someone started a thread about it.

Exactly. Most of that winning percentage isn't a "home ice" advantage, it's an "our team is better at hockey than the other one" advantage.

Winning at home doesn't necessarily indicate a home-ice advantage, it might just indicate a good team. Think of the odds of winning as the sum of: how likely you would be to win on neutral ice + any home-ice advantage. Just looking at the sum of the two, how much each team has won at home, doesn't help you determine any home ice advantage. If UND wins 75% of its road games and 75% of its home games, it has no apparent home ice advantage; whereas if St. Cloud won 0% of its road games but 50% of its home games, that may indicate a huge home ice advantage. In those scenarios, UND's home winning percentage is .75 and SCSU's is only .50, yet playing at home is clearly a much more critical determinant of SCSU's outcomes than UND's. That said, UND did seem to have a home ice advantage in '08, though it was far less pronounced or even reversed for most of the years between REA opening and 2007. Compare UND's performance at home vs. on the road: http://siouxsports.com/mens-hockey/standings/2008/

Yes, Friday's is, per UND media relations. (update -- UND has since added it to their hockey schedule)

The Aggie Football Preview UC Davis game notes -- Great West Championship on the Line

More independent coverage would be great, I've been trying for years to persuade some fan(s) to start a Sioux football blog; none of us amateurs seem to have the correct combination of time and knowledge. However, better coverage from a pro journalist is key in that, since it's their job, they can devote much more time to attending all the media events, gathering obscure info, etc... Keep in mind that to produce the hockey coverage he does, that seems to be almost literally all Brad does. UND has done a decent job at increasing its own coverage over the last two years (promotion is a different story -- still somewhat lacking). I remain reasonably disappointed in the Forum acquisition of the Herald, in that it did cut the professional coverage of major UND sports from two companies to one -- having Forum Comm. be the only professional news organization covering UND sports is a noticeable limitation. Of course, each UND and the Herald have some limitations to how critically they can cover the team, so I think a mix is important in the long run. I have pondered if there was more I could do. Our biggest asset here is a huge readership, so I can deliver a lot of readers but can't sufficiently monetize that to fund a professional position. If anyone has any ideas of anything more we all can do, don't be shy.

I've received a couple questions about why the RPI published on USCHO differs from the RPI table on this site. Since the questions came so back-to-back, I assume USCHO just started publishing theirs, so it was a good time to look into it. The most obvious difference is that it looks like USCHO isn't removing "negative wins." e.g. They list Bemidji St as .6722 http://www.uscho.com/rankings/rpi.php In the SiouxSports RPI details for Bemidji St, you can see that .6722 would be Bemidji St.'s RPI with all games counted, but after removing its wins over Air Force and Northern Michigan, their RPI rises to .6903. http://siouxsports.com/hockey/rankings/rpi...s.php?teamid=24 Since these questions seem to come up every year, until everyone gets their calculations right, I've tried to provide a lot of supporting details so those inclined can see for themselves how SiouxSports.com is calculating RPI (and other ratings). However, it is sometimes still a challenge to determine the differences when comparing to just a ranking table like USCHO's and I have lots of practice, so definitely continue to ask questions if you think you see a problem.

The NHL Network listing has been updated to now say Ferris St at Miami instead of the UND game. My cable box still says UND at Miami on NHL Network, nothing on FOXSA. UND's game notes list it as FSSN and FOXSA.

I've frequently made a point similar to this in regard to hockey and REA in particular. Short-term revenue maximization (e.g. making people pay a trivial amount to tailgate, for an arena tour, to watch a game on the internet, etc...) needs to be carefully weighed against long-term fan loyalty. By treating every interaction with the public as a business transaction in which UND extracts maximum revenue, I think they risk turning their fans into customers instead. That would have the potential to be a big negative in the long-run, because customers don't have the same loyalty fans do. When the team is down, the novelty of a new arena has worn off, or the customers don't perceive that they're getting their value, they might move on much more quickly. I wonder if you can get more stable revenue out of more loyal fans in the long run. They'll keep showing up when the team loses, they'll send checks when they're alums, and they'll buy their kids Sioux gear, etc... As a counterpoint -- REA and UND seem to have done fine for themselves ignoring my advice to date, so I'm probably just a crotchety old guy whose memories of his student days (when we could walk in free to any football or hockey game) is out of touch with modern realities.

I got stranded there on the way home from Madison last Spring. We had the first flight out of Madison in the morning, it had been canceled when we arrived at the airport. They couldn't get us out of Madison until about 6pm, then that flight was delayed enough due to deicing that we missed the connection in Cincy by mere seconds. When we landed I was checking the status on my phone and the next flight was still at the gate -- we were literally going from one end of the U to the other, ran the entire thing, missed it by minutes. Since the delay was the airport's fault instead of the airline's, we had to get our own hotel and stay in KY overnight. Once all was said and done, I ended up missing 3 days of work to go to a couple weekend hockey games in Madison.

Yeah, it cleans it up a lot to have the symmetry of the items within a section. I also think that a section with 30 items was just too much to scan visually, whereas ~10-15 is doable. The thing I was trying to move away from with the previous change was this summer when there were two ancient videos and photos on the top of the page while there were dozens of new stories below. The new scheme only shows the top 30 (or 20) items, but restores sorting by type. So, if half the top items are videos, the videos section grows, etc... I think it captures the best benefits of both.