jimdahl

It's sold out, but getting tickets should be no problem. Keep an eye on the ticket forums (USCHO is a good place to start, the ticket forum here will draw traffic when the Sioux make it). Things seem to pick up most after the seedings are announced. Judging from the past few years, you should have no problem getting St. Louis tickets at face value. When the Frozen Four began selling out simultaneous with the introduction of the priority system around 2000, the secondary market became huge. Only when local teams made it in traditional markets (St. Paul, Boston, Milwaukee) was it at all tight, and tickets moved well below face value in the last week or two before the event in "non-traditional" markets (e.g. Columbus).

Another year, another cockamamy change to the D-II playoff selection criteria to encourage D2's to play more D2's. Division II football committee encourages intra-division competition The NCAA has been trying for years (but apparently not succeeding to their satisfaction?) to encourage more intradivision play in D2. Boy am I glad to be getting off this merry-go-round (though hesitance on the part of D-IIs to play up could make scheduling more difficult for an in-transition II/I-AA).

I noticed the l'Bistro on the floor plan and the lack of description of such on the web site. Thanks for the udpate.

As quick as I am to call out the troublemakers or poseurs when I spot them, I'd be remiss not to defend a good member who's being judged on his primary allegiance. Click his name and browse BisonMav's last 30 posts or so before you lump him in with the Bison trolls who have been torturing us lately. He's a longtime member, is generally a polite contributor, and is no stranger to hockey.

I hadn't seen these before (and don't see them in this thread): 3-D artist rendering (Windows media, large) floorplan (pdf) Features: Tavern United British Pub (menu wine list) Garbonzo's Pizza Aalto's Garden Cafe Playmaker's Gaming Lounge (this one confuses me -- I guess gaming licenses are easy to get in Canada, but Grand Forks?) Grand Forks is starting to look very different than when I left.

Not a graphical bracket layout, if that's what you're looking for, but a list of the games w/game times: Field set for 2007 Red Baron WCHA Final Five

Are "objective UND fans" allowed, or only fans who actually cheer for UND sports? The way the question is constructed, I expect the outcomes to be heavily biased toward "take #8". My answer comes in 3 parts, each more insightful than the last. 1. It's fair to assume that within some medium-term period, UND will have acquired another hockey championship and have a trip to the NCAA basketball tournament (once a member of an autobid conference, it would take an extraordinary stretch of futility to never make it). Therefore, giving up all future college hockey championships for one such trip is a bad trade. 2. Further, it's reasonable to expect that UND will gain significantly more than 1 additional hockey championship in my lifetime. For the sake of this point, I'll assume that the exposure from a single trip to the basketball tournament provides more "exposure" than infinite trips to the hockey tournament (I'm not claiming this is true, just stipulating it for this paragraph's argument). It's not a good tradeoff for me, as a fan, to get the school the minimal "exposure" of a single eventually forgotten basketball tournament appearance than the lifetime of joy attending Frozen Fours and tracking each Sioux season, knowing there's a chance. 3. Finally, as to the question of "exposure", the exposure one gets from being a doormat (or even more unlikely, Cinderella) in the NCAA basketball tournament is name recognition. Great for a school like GMU to become on the "I've heard of them" radar of more people across the country. Unnecessary for a school like University of <state name>. All that said, I've posted many times that a trip to the NCAA basketball tournament will be bigger for our basketball teams than a D-II championship, in terms of both excitement and a goal worth playing toward.

Not trying to give you crap (I love to link as broadly as possible and spread the college hockey love across the web). I just can't resist responding to questions on the SiouxSports.com forums about features that actually exist on SiouxSports.com, because new users are continually rolling onto the forums without an awareness of the breadth of other features. I'm a big fan of everything USCHO and CHN are doing across the sport, and my job here would be a lot harder if they weren't doing theirs'. Visit them often.

A Sioux fan may actually prefer SiouxSports.com's B-T (KRACH) rankings, which are centered on the Sioux (thus far easier to compare the Sioux to other teams at a glance), generally more up-to-date than CHN, and are easily findable without leaving the site (just click the KRACH link on the hockey front page). However, if one irrationally feared bias in well-defined mathematical calculations, I would at least look to USCHO's KRACH page long before CHN, again for data integrity reasons.

Not to pick on you, specifically, why do so many people make posts telling other people what they shouldn't be posting about? If you don't want to discuss a particular topic, the threading system is great for helping you avoid it. Why tell other people they shouldn't discuss a topic because you're sick of it? A huge number of UND and NDSU fans are anxious for this game to resume, so the question of when is going to continue to come up until it's scheduled. At least it's in a well-named, independent thread.

Wolf3D, you're dating yourself with that one. I remember being blown away the first time I saw it. Of course the best thing about Wolf3D was that it was a sequel to Castle Wolfenstein. Halt! Schweinhund!

I know it was meant for entertainment value, but I can't let this go by without making sure everyone understands that the numbers are at least 80% meaningless. The so called "score" is the sum of: points for being a top-level-domain (e.g. siouxsports.com instead of bob.siouxsports.com) points for not having unwanted chars (e.g. chars not possible on an American keyboard) points for being short () points for having pages archived in archive.org, 1 point per archive And indeterminate points based on finds in search engines (with google, the search engine that drives 90% of traffic, always apparently coming up 0) Any domain any of us are interested in will get full points on #1 and #2. So, they're estimating the value of a domain to be a combination of: 1) how popular the site currently at the domain is (ok, there's some merit to thinking you'd pick up some of that traffic) 2) how long the site has been up / how frequently the front page (only) has changed substantially enough to instruct archive.org to reindex it 3) how short the name is The second is absolutely meaningless, and unfortunately tends to dominate "low-value" domains. The third has some merit, ceteris paribus, but siouxsports.com is indisputably infinitely more valuable than sioxsprts.com, though the latter gets more length points. To kick a dog while it's down, a quick look at their forums confirms how serious an enterprise this is.

Do you all know something I don't? I've been keeping on eye on schedules of what I consider to be likely opponents (including recent opponents) pretty closely, and Mesa State's schedule has been out a while, and we're not on it. Though neither of us seem to have conference obligations on Sept. 8, they already have 11 games.

UND has had the choral versions from the Bards online for years. Starting from SiouxSports.com's School Songs page, follow the right-hand link to "choral versions". We supplemented those with the pep band versions, available from that same page, somewhat recently.

Yeah, I'm a little surprised how big the jump was since the previous record of 260 simultaneous users had held since last September. FYI -- simultaneous users is an estimate because we can't actually tell how long someone looks at a page. Almost every message board I've been to uses the standard of calling accesses within 15 minutes simultaneous (the notable exception being AGS, which seems to include many hours worth of visitors, in effect reporting number of daily visitors instead of simultaneous)

While I agree, I would've said the same about the Bison four years ago.

While you're right from a WCHA tournament seeding perspective (which would use the h2h tiebreaker to give the higher seed to UW), it's worth noting that the Sioux would actually finish tied for 6th in conference standings in that scenario.

Visitors to SiouxSports.com's RPI page could learn everything that's known about the RPI, including both the fact that an unknown number of bonus points are awarded only for road wins and the link to the NCAA release announcing that change for '06-'07.

With apologies in advance to Goon , that's just a generic error that means it can't contact the database. 99% of the time, it'll be temporary and reloading (either immediately or in a few minutes) will work. The problem referenced at the top of this thread was a more permanent error in which the database was corrupted so needed manual attention from me. Meanwhile, I continue to try to optimize things to handle peak loads. It's a never ending back-and-forth battle because peak loads keep increasing.

There's no question UND would have preferred the status quo (a stable NCC and D-II). However, externalities outside our control (changing D-II and loss of our peers in the NCC) eliminated that as an option. Forced to choose between declining with D-II and the NCC or make a risky reclassification, UND is making the only obvious choice. No doubt there's some fiscal risk, but I think UND is planning for and managing it quite responsibly (as demonstrated by the Bisonville Forensic Accounting club's repeated failures at unearthing fiscal distress at UND in excess of that at NDSU).

The vendor of this message board software just came out with a new patch that fixes a problem with the board remembering login information. Hopefully that will address the remaining issues. I won't apply that until Sunday because the board is so busy on Fridays and Saturdays.

FYI -- here's the annual WCHA possibilities. In short, for UND: * Can finish anywhere from 2nd to 7th * Can clinch 6th with 2 points this weekend * Can clinch 5th with 4 points this weekend * Can no longer finish 2nd with fewer than 1 point this weekend The last three are just the guaranteed results of UND's wins/losses. Obviously, if UND wins and other certain teams lose, they could do even better or worse. I've seen a few other sources try to do this sort of analysis, but mess up the head-to-head problem (that is, counting the possibilities including both teams winning or losing a certain contest). So, it seemed worth getting this out there.

The good news is that I think they'll be back on as of this weekend. I managed to get them working with a new data provider before the Mankato series, but wanted to test it myself against some real incoming data before sending thousands of messages out to you guys. Then, in unfortunate timing, I was out of the country / away from a computer for the past week, so didn't turn them on for the Duluth series. I'll browse the logs more carefully to make sure there were no glitches while I was away, but if it went as well as I think it did, I expect to turn them back on tomorrow.

If Notre Dame plays just one more TUC (likely in a conference tournament), we could easily take the TUC comparison and that pairwise comparison if we perform well enough in our remaining contests against TUCs. The rest that you list are pretty out of reach. The closest would be if we went about 1.000 and Maine went about .500, we could overtake them on RPI. Their quality road wins are really helping them; we would otherwise be about equal. The more interesting thing to note from UND's RPI details page is that due to the strength of our remaining opponents, we need to go 5/7 just to keep our current RPI. A drop to .545 (from going 4 of 7) would cause us to lose the BU and Michigan comparisons on RPI.

I'm suspending this for now. You won't receive any text messages from SiouxSports.com (until further notice). In short, I continue to have problems getting a reliable feed of NCAA hockey scores. After a very successful trial in the Fall, it appeared worth expanding to a larger trial group of forum readers. The enrollment response just to this posting was overwhelming, so I'll continue to pursue a reliable feed and reinstitute it if/when possible.