Hammersmith

If USD had beaten NDSU by 2 or 3 scores(especially if the win had been in Fargo), then I would completely agree with you. But it was a 1pt win in Vermillion with the wining score coming in the last 30sec. To me, that's basically a tie. Same with the SDSU win over USD, and the NDSU win over SDSU. So with those three teams all at the same level, you have to go to the rest of the resume, and NDSU has a small but real advantage there. I wouldn't have been upset with NDSU at 3 or 4, but they do have the best case for the 2.

I could see UCD sneaking in somewhere for the same reason. Mont St 12-0, 1 FBS win(4pts over 5-6 UNM), 9 FCS wins, 0 FCS losses, 3 ranked FCS wins(UM, UCD, Idaho) NDSU 10-2, 1 FBS loss(5pts to 16/18 8-2 Colorado), 10 FCS wins, 1 FCS loss(ranked-away-1pt), 3 ranked FCS wins(SDSU, ISUr, MSU*) SDSU 10-2, 1 FBS loss(24pts to 3-7 OK St), 9 FCS wins, 1 FCS loss(ranked-away-4pts), 2 ranked FCS wins(USD, MSU*) USD 9-2, 1 FBS loss(14pts to 5-5 Wisc), 7 FCS wins, 1 FCS loss(ranked-away-3pts - OT), 1 ranked FCS win(NDSU) UCD** 9-2, 1 FBS loss(18pts to 5-5 Cal), 9 FCS wins, 1 FCS loss(ranked-home-2pts), 2 ranked FCS wins(UM, Idaho) *Missouri St is not ranked in all FCS polls because of the FBS transition **UCD has one game left tonight(Sac St) I'm using current rankings, not what the opponents were ranked at the time of the games. All records are current as I'm posting this. Several of the FBS opponents have games in progress or later tonight. The only spot I'm certain of is Mont St at #1.

I don't envy the selection committee seeding 2-4. FBS NDSU 5pt loss to 16/18 Colorado (8-2) USD 14pt loss to NR Wisconsin (5-5) SDSU 24pt loss to NR Oklahoma St (3-7) FCS NDSU 4pt win over SDSU at home SDSU 3pt win over USD at home in OT USD 1pt win over NDSU at home USD minus one game vs. Port St because of whooping cough

As far as I know, reported playoff attendance figures are also paid attendance. The real difference in the case of playoffs is that there are very few no-shows(excepting for severe weather). During the regular season, single-game tickets might be purchased months in advance and things might come up for people(like a terrible season). And often season ticket holders might skip a game or three. But playoff tickets are purchased only a week before the game and generally only by those that actually plan to attend. So actual attendance and paid attendance are very close. As for student tickets, there are no student tickets at playoff games. At least not from the NCAA perspective. If UND is offering free tickets to students, those tickets have been purchased by UND(and/or donors) at full face value. As such, they will be counted toward reported attendance whether they're used or not.

6 years is the oldest in the country? Because of the constraints of their facility, UNI chose to go with the non-infill version of the same turf that's in the Fargodome and Dakotadome. Instead of PVC infill on top of the base layer, they went with a PVC pad under the base layer. They tried an infill turf last time and it was a complete disaster for them.

I'm jumping into this late, but if this about fighting any changes to the 1500 flight hour rule for your commercial pilot license, then the pilots association is totally in the wrong. The 1500 hour rule was a stupid overreaction to a couple incidents that has probably ended up costing more lives than it's saved. Listen to very qualified pilots talk about the rule and see what they say about it. The 1500 hour rule mostly got pushed because of a couple accidents where two inexperienced pilots were paired together and ended up getting over their heads and crashed their planes, killing all on board. The root problem wasn't inexperience, it was either poor pilot scheduling by the airline(putting two inexperienced pilots together, or putting two pilots together that had the same weaknesses) or cases where a small budget airline expanded too quickly and could only afford hiring a bunch of new pilots that diluted the airline's talent pool to the point where they couldn't put at least one experienced pilot on every flight. The seemingly easy solution by Congress was to make all pilots experienced. But the law of unintended consequences is a cast iron bitch. Where do those 1500 hours come from? Aspiring pilots can't afford to pay for them themselves. So these inexperienced pilots have to take jobs that count towards the 1500. And a lot of those jobs fall into two categories: way too simple or way too dangerous. The way too simple jobs are like checking power lines. This is a really common job for young pilots to work up to their 1500. They're hired by the power company to just fly along the power lines to check for encroachment of vegetation or damage to the lines/towers. The pilots get into their light GA aircraft at a small airport, take off and fly visually to the power line for the day, then visually follow the line and check for problems, then they fly back to the same small airport or another one just like it before repeating the cycle again and again. After a hundred or so hours of this type of flying, the pilot plateaus and doesn't get any better. They're not getting any practice flying in and out of busy airports, or flying on instruments, or in the dark, or bad weather, or at high altitude, or any of a dozen other things that a commercial pilot needs to know. They end up with 1500 hours, but their real skill level is closer to 300. Then there are the jobs that are way too dangerous. An example is banner flying. Those pilots have to fly a light aircraft at low speeds to pick up a banner off the ground(very dangerous), then they have to fly with the banner just a few knots above their aircraft's stall speed. If any little thing goes wrong, they crash and die. They can release the banner, but that has to happen before a certain point or it's too late. Many young pilots hold on just a few seconds too long, thinking they still have time to save things, but they don't. After that point, releasing the banner almost makes things worse. They go from a possibly controllable crash, to an uncontrolled one(often inverted). So why do inexperienced pilots do a job so dangerous? Because they need a way to get the 1500, the banner companies don't pay enough to get experienced pilots(there are much better jobs out there), and some young pilots still feel they are invulnerable. The solution to the problem is to reduce the 1500 real flight hours and switch much of them to quality simulator time(paid for by the airlines as part of their training programs). In the simulator, the young pilots can be bombarded with complex scenarios constantly for months and examined all the while to get a super close look at what they're good and bad at. Then the later part of their sim training can focus on correcting their weaknesses instead of just reinforcing bad habits like the 1500 rule can end up doing. The rest of the world doesn't use the 1500 rule, and the nations with rules otherwise similar to ours have safety records that are every bit as good. I only watch a few pilot channels closely, and every single one of them think the 1500 hour rule hurts far more than it helps. And they've got the receipts to prove it. 74 Gear, Mentour Pilot, and blancolirio just to name a few. If the pilot's association is so dead set against this reform, I would start asking why by following the money. I bet there's a reason they don't want it, and it's not about safety. Or the leadership fighting it is so far removed from what it's like to grind out the 1500 that they're completely out of touch with the realities.

Yes, I'm knocking ANYTHING made by Alienware. They're trash and anyone who's kept up with the industry knows it. Once they were bought out by Dell 17 years ago, they started sliding down the hill. They've got good people who want to do good things, but they're completely hamstrung by the pencil pushers. That funky case that looks so cool? It's actually a ten year old basic Dell design at its core that's just got some cheap plastic panels clipped on. Because of it's age, it's thermal design is antiquated and can't keep up with the demands of modern components. The top Core i9 CPUs actually get throttled down in those cases from overheating even with tons of stuff the designers tried to add to combat heat because they were forced to use the old chassis by Dell corporate. And then there's the fact that almost EVERYTHING in Alienware machines is proprietary. Can't swap motherboards. Can't swap power supplies. Can't swap cables. Swapping video cards is iffy depending on the power connector. Any they're not even priced competitively compared to what you give up by buying one.

Alienware machines? Somebody doesn't know what they're doing(or last knew what they were doing 15 years ago).

That's where I got it. Section 12.8.3 - Criteria for Determining Season of Competition. The exceptions are 12.8.3.1.1 through 12.8.3.1.7. Pages 66-67 according to the manual, or 79-80 according to the pdf.

I believe it's decided by each individual sport committee(which is made up of athletic directors that represent conferences that sponsor the sport). I don't think there's anything preventing the ice hockey committee from instituting a similar rule. Field hockey, both soccers, all three volleyballs, both water polos, baseball, lacrosse, softball, and men's wrestling all have some form of allowing players to compete in a partial season without burning a season of competition. (in addition to football)

I don't know your players. Are we talking injury or redshirt? Actually, I don't think it matters. Redshirt: There is no exemption for ice hockey like there is for football. In hockey, if you play one game, you lose the season. Injury: 30% of the season +1 = 11 games. Even if UND advances to the NCHC finals, it's still 11 games. We would have to interpret the rules as loosely as possible to allow all potential NCHC and NCAA championship games to count. Then the maximum number of games in a season for UND would be 34+2+4=40. 40*0.3=12; 12+1=13. He would just barely make the cutoff. My gut says the only chance for Johnson's season to qualify for a hardship waiver is for UND to have played all 34 allowed regular season games, then make it to both the NCHC finals and NCAA finals. The chart says "the institution's completed schedule" not the maximum possible for any institution. Figure 12-1, pages 76-77 according to the document, 89-90 according to the pdf reader: https://web3.ncaa.org/lsdbi/reports/getReport/90008

Small number of words for ... not smart enough to refute any point. Simple.

Those pics are worthless. The endzone camera shows absolutely nothing other than the ball moving around. In that last image, the hand in front of the ball is from the top UIW player, not UIW 20. It doesn't show who established possession first. The real question is whether NDSU 49 got his elbow around the ball before UIW 20 snuck it out from underneath him. I honestly don't know from the one angle that we've seen that shows it. There were at least six possible cameras that had some sort of angle on the play and we only saw three of them(and one of those three was not zoomed or slowed). I'm not going to post screenshots, but if you can get the game on the ESPN player, go to 3:16:17/3:33:54. If you advance the frames slowly using the spacebar, you can see the nose of the football start to peek out to the left of NDSU 49's arm that's braced on the ground. Nobody has established possession yet. This is happening after all three of the pics you were referring to. If you advance the video slowly, you can see UIW 20 begin to insert his right arm under 49's body to get the ball, but 49 quickly cuts that off by pulling his elbow in. At that point, you can see the other nose of the ball peeking out of the crook in 49's elbow. 20's left hand and arm are also underneath 49's body trying to pull the ball out from under him. Before either can be determined from this angle, the ball disappears from view. UIW 20 eventually retrieves the ball from under NDSU 49, but it's possible 49 was able to get his elbow around the ball before that and secure it for a moment. If that happened, the play was dead at that instant and nothing that happens later means anything. I honestly don't know who recovered the ball first, but neither does anyone else here. Since replay called it confirmed, I have to assume one of the other angles clearly shows 49's elbow around the ball before 20 yanks it away.

I think what he's saying is that a ref saw the ball had been recovered and blew a whistle to signify the play was dead at a time when the UIW player clearly did not have possession of the ball. Of course the caveat to that is if the ref actually blowing the whistle even saw the fumble. It's very possible the ref blowing the whistle didn't see the fumble and thought the play was over because the runner was down. It may have been a completely different official that ruled the play a fumble recovered by NDSU. Of course we may never know because of ESPN fixating on the wrong camera angles.

Going to say this about the fumble being discussed... We don't know what the replay refs saw because the ESPN crew screwed up and focused on the wrong thing. When the play went to review, the ref clearly said the call on the field was a fumble recovered by NDSU. The ESPN crew, on the other hand, totally missed that fact and thought the refs had ruled the runner down by contact and were reviewing whether it was a fumble or not. Because of this misunderstanding, the ESPN production crew focused all their time looking for camera angles that showed the fumble. They found two, but neither of those angles showed the initial recovery. Meanwhile, the replay refs were focused on camera angles that showed the play from the other side of the field where the recovery could be seen. There were two NDSU players that were in good position to recover the ball(4 and 49), and one UIW player in poor position(20). Since all three were lying on the ground, the moment possession was achieved by any of the three, the play was dead. The fact that the refs came back pretty quickly with a 'call confirmed' rather than a 'call stands', suggests very greatly that there was a camera angle we didn't get to see(through ESPN incompetence) that clearly showed who recovered the ball first and that it was one of the two NDSU players (from the position of the bodies, I'm betting Kobe Johnson(4) recovered his own fumble before it got stripped away by UIW). I'm not going to say the refs were great, but they called the game the same for both sides. There were plays made by both teams that could have easily been DPI. The only DPI that were actually called were extremely egregious. The same goes for holding. There were several no-calls on both teams that other crews would have flagged. The targeting no-call against UIW could have easily gone either way(this is from DI/II/III refs). The one I didn't like was the call against UIW on the late hit versus the no-call on NDSU for the same thing. While I'll agree the timing was tighter on the NDSU tackle(the NDSU runner was completely down and the play over before the UIW player launched himself onto the pile, while the second NDSU tackler initiated his tackle while the UIW QB was on his way to the ground but not yet completely down), I still would rather have seen them called the same, even though it would have hurt NDSU a ton(the NDSU no-call was on 3rd and 15 and would have resulted in a UIW 1st down).