jimdahl

1368 -- Total rebounds by the 2007 Sioux Women's basketball team (last season in D-II)

While UND should easily handle OPEN WEEK, I'm a little worried about attendance.

@Mankato generally isn't that hard to get and its a fun place to go to a game. Their site says they're on sale next Monday.

Though the Sioux announcers initially said it was short, in the post-game the SE LA guys who were right there said it was long enough and went just inches outside the post.

Yep -- fighting back to stay in the game doesn't erase that a lot of us expected or hoped it would go far better, but it's certainly better than not fighting back and instead getting clobbered. It also makes it a lot easier to be optimistic about the future, which is why we tune in during the transition. As I said in my last post, I don't see SE LA potentially being better than expected as making much of a difference, because the Sioux had some of the same problems last week against a not-great FCS team. There are simply some things the Sioux need to tighten up and improve on to consistently win games like this.

Reminds me of your question a few pages back. Each could have gone the other way and the Sioux won one and lost one 38-35, but we also saw tonight's defensive problems last week when playing a questionable FCS team. Whether SELA is better than expected or not doesn't affect that. Like fightingsioux4life said, the Sioux have a few years of I-AA/increased scholarship recruiting ahead of them before we can really start to judge where the transition will land them in FCS, but no doubt things are going to have to speed up and tighten up if that's going to be where we want them to. I've never been much for moral victories myself, but it would have been a lot more annoying to have the team roll over when sliding toward an unexpected blowout rather than fight back to keep it close. Though not a moral victory, I view it as sufficient incentive to continue to tune in.

Look at you two sandbagging Seriously, though, I think most Sioux fans would have been happy to write NDSU off as an anomaly (though still would have been envious). However, that NDSU *and* SDSU became reasonably successful, ranked teams during their transitions suggested to me that the gap between the top of DII and I-AA wasn't as big as I thought (though I, admittedly, previously thought it was huge). I do agree with your points about our team having entirely been recruited for D-II, and would add that we aren't yet feeling the recruiting effects of a massive increase in scholarships. There's certainly no guarantee that those will give UND similar success (UNC is a fine counterexample), but I don't think its unreasonable for fans to be hopefully and perhaps even optimistic about UND's future in FCS.

PAT MISSED!?! Argh. Well, it's still 2 scores and a couple big defensive stands...

The SELA announcers are saying it bounced off a lineman, so should have been an illegal touch instead of a TD.

Opponents announcers (which I always think is more fun, plus it works on non-Windows machines, no login required -- are you paying attention UND?)

At the half -- Idaho St (0-3) 21, Eastern Washington (1-2) 21

There's precedent to define "opponents" loosely

Montana St takes an early lead over USD, 7-0 with 7:33 to go in the 1st Central Washington draws first blood against Montana, 7-0 with 10:44 to go in the 1st Final: Northeastern defeated UC-Davis, 27-10

UND plans to dissolve School of Communication This says it all to me:

As long as the name you want is available, I can change it for you. Either respond in this thread, or drop me a PM (one of the options if you click on my name).

I haven't been... blessed... with knowing anything about a fourth, but around here the doctors wouldn't LET you go 9 days late on the first, they'd be in there yanking her out by now.

They both might be right. The Pocatello Marathon reportedly has a 1600ft change in elevation in the first 14 miles. OT: I don't think I remember ever seeing over 200 simultaneous on the board for a football game before.

If more of you gave up, maybe it would get better for me

I'm just the messenger -- thanks UND athletics!

Just wanted to point this out to all the football fans here... UND is reaching out to Internet fans, so we should encourage future such endeavors with a positive response to this one.

While you and I know before the season begins that beating SCSU should give you less credit than beating Ohio St, a strictly mathematical model that only examined this season wouldn't. To interject some of that human-like intuition and produce a somewhat meaningful ranking from week 1, most of them initialize each team with some credit for last year's results. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that UND finished around the 23rd FCS school last season.

I must say, some of the anti-NDSU arguments are a bit familiar. They're similar to the arguments a lot of us made when we were fans of a D-II football team watching one of our D-II rivals move to I-AA. Some points are true, but some are born of misunderstanding. When NDSU was moving, I thought UND should move too but also asked some questions similar to the above because I believed the hype that I-AA was such a step up that the SUs would have thrown away exciting rivalries for .500 records versus unknown teams. I worried that would reduce attendance and lead to financial strains. Instead we've seen that the SUs were immediately competitive (SDSU moreso than it was in D-II), bringing new excitement to the programs. DeLand can feel sorry for the SUs and UxDs, but he won't be joining SU fans in that assessment, as attendance is up over 50% at NDSU and 100% at SDSU. Clearly those fans are excited about those games, even if an SCSU columnist is not. It's still true that FCS is not the big time, I-AA teams aren't generally more nationally known than II teams, and in a lot of ways I-AA is just a different lower division than II. I, for one, am as happy to see our Great West conferencemates on future schedules as I would be to see SCSU instead; and the ability to get a game vs. a Texas Tech or even a Minnesota is exciting to the fan base and players, and does provide an exciting glimpse of the "big time" that SCSU isn't going to get from the NSIC.

Oh, I had a good one for 1385, too. 1385 = career points by Durlene Heisler, #12 all-time in career points for the Sioux WBB.

I read it as an endorsement of a name that evokes memories of the Fighting Sioux nickname. E.g. something related to American Indians, but not the word Sioux itself.

Goetz says he wants to speed up timeline for nickname resolution eh? Uh?