jimdahl

Ah, my bad, didn't think to check there. Good source though, I've recently noticed CHN is definitely most current during games. Anyway, that's why I tried to answer the question at large -- there is no other tie-breaker. When it looks tied, there are almost certainly digits not being displayed that are deciding.

Not sure what source you're using, but I see about a .0005 difference here and about a .0003 difference on USCHO (which is missing about 5 finished games as of now). There's no official tie-breaker beyond RPI (except the "interconference strength" criterion I've never seen come into play), but I've also never seen truly identical RPIs. Most of us only publish it to 4 digits, but the full actual number is what's considered in compraisons.

Uh oh, I promised SiouxMD I'd keep up the countdown while he was out for a couple weeks, guess that's started already. I'll try, but seriously folks, feel free to jump in and help For yesterday, Feb. 19 The Sioux men's hockey team began their now infamous mid-season turnaround in 2008-09 with a sweep over Harvard, capped when Frattin scored the GWG with 12:27 remaining. http://www.fightingsioux.com/ViewArticle.d...;ATCLID=3629574

As always, a chance for some good movement this weekend...

Not so fast... after a 2-15 run, UND 63, SIU-E 49 7:53 remaining. Could only suiting 8 be taking its toll?

I can see how some would say he's not classy, it depends what traits you're examining. On the ice, his rep is primarily hard worker and very clean player (to the point that when Heward heard it was Alex who hit him, he declared it must have been accidental -- there's your contrast with Crosby). He's also more active in the community than I remember any past Caps star being (e.g. he personally buys 8 tickets to every game and donates them to children and soldiers, with whom he usually takes the time to meet each game). However, he definitely doesn't go out and get the job on the ice done quietly -- he definitely hams it up, embellishes, and plays to the crowd. I've always viewed it as a guy who's already getting attention trying to bring personality and excitement to the game and the crowd. I'd probably view it differently if a guy without the goods were doing some of the same stuff to try to get attention (e.g. the hat and glasses at the All Star skills contest).

Was watching on t.v. -- when they showed the replay on the big screen and the crowd cheered, Ovechkin cupped his hand to his ear and egged the crowd on and the place went crazy. I considered posting the link this morning myself, but figured I'd get in trouble with the moderators if I made another off-topic Caps thread.

To be fair, it used to be more balanced until I added the "More blogs..." link on the SiouxSports front page, which links to the North Dakota stories page. That sends a quite a few people per day to a list of the stories tagged UND, giving them lots of clicks. I always meant to reach out more to sites for some other teams and point out / encourage them to use the feeds for their teams, but college hockey blogging never took off quite as much as I expected (very few teams have more than one or two blogs dedicated to them) so nothing ever came of that.

I don't see how they can claim to be representative of the UND community and nickname stakeholders without anyone from SiouxSports.com on the committee They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother...

There was some coverage of this in the Herald last weekend. Kupchella recovers from triple bypass heart surgery

The intertubes are overflowing with pre-game coverage, I added all the links I could find. Sioux Hockey News Links

This is probably more than you're looking for, but I was going to do it for Sagard anyway. I've never run it for a team other than UND before, so the likelihood I recorded something wrong is much higher than usual, but we'll see how it goes. UMN has a lot of downside potential this weekend. Anything short of a sweep likely knocks them out. To finish the regular season in the top 13 requires winning 6 of 8 to be probable, 7 of 8 to be almost a lock.

Ouch, talk about losing sight of the forest for the trees. Though the TUC cliff is certainly real, it's one of those things whose legend has somehow grown far beyond reality. UND is on track to end the regular season with 25 games vs. TUCs. Back of the envelope, say UND ends up 14-9-2 vs. TUCs (.600): If an opponent against whom UND was 3-1-0 became a TUC, our record would change to 17-10-2 (.621) Or dropped from being a TUC, our record would change to 11-8-2 (.571) This isn't RPI where everyone is concentrated between .5 and .6, our opponents' TUCs are all over the map (check it out). Moving TUC up or down .02-.04 just isn't going to matter enough to be hoping for losses at this point in the season.

Virgil Hill, Grand Forks native, fought at the Ralph once. (I even managed to drop in the same first letter of last name as Big A HG's reset)

This week's forecast is up. Here's the weekend chart: If ever there was a time to cue a "gotta win"... I've never seen it so skewed in all six weeks we've been doing this More details (regular season outlook, who to cheer for this weekend) on the other end of the link. After last week's hasty error I sanity-checked the "who we want to win", but am reassured that Siouxweet will notice any errors.

I think until they get bit by it, they take the attitude of "if we win, it will work itself out". Until you get screwed by a particular formula, you assume it's as good as any other. Not only does a big name team on the bubble need to get excluded, but there needs to be an obviously comparable team who slipped in due to playing cupcakes. e.g. Minnesota and North Dakota have otherwise identical records, UM beat Holy Cross in the grudge match but North Dakota instead scheduled B.C. so of course lost, so UM gets in. Then people will start to think about it. We actually saw something similar in D-II football a few years back when NDSU got excluded from the tournament in a season they beat I-AA Montana. The arbitrary SOS rules at the time gave less credit for beating a I-AA than losing to a top-tier D-II team. Those rules were change by the next Fall.

Though true, I think the bolded statement is a little misleading. Given that RPI is just one component of the PWR, in which most teams are compared on 2-4 criteria, reordering teams slightly in any single criterion is only going to make minor movements in the PWR. However, if we truly believed that those changes didn't matter, why bother making them? The effect of the reweighting is very easy to describe -- the new formula diminishes the importance of strength-of-schedule in favor of win percentage (a more detailed defense of that statement is in A quick look at the effects of the new RPI formula, which I wrote in the change's first season, Jan '07). That further encourages teams like UND to make sure their out-of-conference matchups are winnable instead of against good opponents (an attribute already present in COP and, to some degree, TUC). While UND doesn't seem to have begun optimizing its PWR chances by scheduling boring games, the incentive to do so increased by weakening the SOS component of RPI.

Marty Schriner -- my first favorite Sioux hockey player

Cal Marvin

I lost track of it, what's the status of the NCAA's regional preference for tournaments? At one point, people were saying that regionality could trump bracket integrity this year, resulting in a near guarantee that BU doesn't go to Grand Rapids or Minnesota (and similarly that UND doesn't go to Bridgeport). I guess the implication of this discussion is that they've softened on that?

I read it as a joke, contrasting with the media circus that occurs when hockey players have been cited with even the most minor infractions. Either that, or DAR just really dislikes football

Yeah, the granting of a full comparison point for each h2h game definitely makes some weird cliffs in PWR, which create situations just like you're hypothesizing. However, it would take a pretty weird set of circumstances for UND to be fighting for a tournament spot, but playing a TUC in the first round of the WCHA tourney. I guess if we were WCHA #5 playing WCHA #6, there have been years where #6 was a TUC, but not this year Or were you thinking of the Final Five?

2009 PWR History (UND vs. neighbors) siouxweet is right, OSU has been ahead of UND since UND became a TUC.

Yeah, AZSioux chatting about the pic is what reminded me it was time for an update (the old one would be about 2.5 years old now). Though the two pics above were intentionally picked for maximum similarity, I really don't hear it much on the street. About once a year, I'd say, someone claims I look like someone famous -- about 3/4 of the time its Neil Patrick Harris, about 1/4 its Tim Robbins. I have a tougher time with the latter, given that he looks twice my age.

See this thread -- AZSioux beat you to it