UND92,96

UND assistant coach Jace Schillinger's brother had a very nice game for Montana today--13 tackles and a pick.

Montana may be one of those teams that plays to the level of its competition, which results in many games being closer than you'd think--Idaho St., UC-Davis, Cal Poly and spotting a good-but-not-great SDSU team a huge lead before the big comeback being examples from this year.

52 UND 73 IPFW Not a lot of good things to say, aside from the fact that UND didn't get out-rebounded. Sioux shot just 30%.

I'm not a big fan of comparing scores, but for whatever it's worth, USD defeated Mayville State 99-67 a few weeks ago.

I can respect that opinion, although I will say that a coaching search after this season would likely yield a considerably better group of candidates than it did four years ago. We're down to two more years of the transition, and in all likelihood we will be in the Summit in another two or three years, and that's a lot better than what we were facing in 2006 (although the dI move hadn't been officially announced until shortly after Jones was hired). I can accept going winless against tournament-eligible teams. I don't necessarily like it, but I can accept it. But when a team has as few winnable games as this team does, I have a much harder time accepting anything less than 100% effort against teams like Mayville. And if we can't win a couple of games against teams that are ranked as low or lower than ourselves, i.e. NJ Tech and Houston Baptist, it will speak volumes about where we are, and whether there's any hope for marked improvement next year minus Bledsoe and Mertens. Wins and losses aren't everything, but neither are they completely meaningless at the college level either, even during a transition with no real conference title to compete for. And there's also the issue of rapidly falling attendance, and whether the Jones style of basketball can or will result in something people actually want to watch.

I don't believe Jones has had any wins against programs clearly more advantaged than UND in terms of resources, although in fairness at the dII level we rarely ever played such teams. In any event, the following are probably the best wins during Jones' tenure: 2006-07 @ St. Cloud St. 2007-08 @ USD in NCC tournament 2008-09 @ UM-Kansas City (lone win vs. non-transitional dI program thus far) Of course, I wouldn't classify any of these wins as even close to being on par with what Mayville did the other night in terms of beating a team despite having only a fraction of the resources. At this point, my only expecations for this team are to beat St. Olaf, and to split the four games with Houston Baptist and NJ Tech, both of which currently have lower RPI's than UND. I don't think that's too much to expect.

Just curious--so in your opinion Jones is back next year regardless of the team's record this year?

I don't know whether this was linked earlier in this thread or not, but this Wayne Nelson blog more or less echoes my own feelings (scroll down to "Rough, rough night"): http://www.areavoices.com/waynenelson/

LaFrance's college basketball career is over: http://www.areavoices.com/waynenelson/ So if my math is correct, we now have either two or three available scholarships for next year, depending upon the Sharkova situation.

Bohl is probably feeling the heat, and had to throw somebody under the bus I guess. Ironically, isn't that what happened to him at Nebraska back in the day?

I figured somebody would misconstrue that post. To answer the questions--none of them, and I don't. I was just curious after reading through the lengthy thread from four years ago. Maybe I was the only one, or this wasn't the right thread to post the info. Sorry.

It doesn't merit its own thread, and I didn't know where else to post it, but I see NDSU defensive coordinator Mike Breske has "resigned": http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/arti...794/group/home/

Not sure whether this is of any interest to anyone, but the following is what became of the other three finalists for the UND job ultimately given to Brian Jones: Tom Brown--still associate head coach at Winona State. Randall Herbst--head coach at the University of Mary, after stops at Florida Southern and UNO. Steve Weemer--still a high school coach in Illinois.

If "crowds" of 640 become the norm, patience may be something Faison can't really afford to have a lot of.

It's really quite inexplicable that Jones didn't sign a true point guard, at least from the high school ranks, until last month. He was hired in June of 2006, and signed his first true point guard in November of 2009.

Unless it was a mis-print in the box score, last night's attendance was just 640. Last year's lowest attendance was a little over 1500.

We know full well how bad this is: http://forum.siouxsports.com/index.php?showtopic=13222

It will probably take a half hour or more to get all the way through it, but it's fascinating to read through this thread given what's going on now: http://forum.siouxsports.com/index.php?showtopic=5512 Sadly, I seem to have lost a lot of my passion for UND basketball since then.

73 Mayville St. 61 UND I have no comment.

Yes--111-27. And MSU-Moorhead beat them by 50 earlier this season.

That 2005 game still leaves a bad taste in my mouth for a couple of reasons. One, the turnovers at the worst possible time by one player in particular were absolute killers. And the other was, if memory serves, the apparent refusal to pay special attention to Chris Denney. Denney was really their only receiving threat, and yet he always seemed to be open in the fourth quarter.

Very true. Keep in mind also that there's something to be said for productivity even if a kid doesn't necessarily have blazing speed or a 40" vertical or can bench 225 pounds 20 times. I don't know anything about Carr, but Miller was extremely productive for probably the best high school program in North Dakota. He seems like the type of kid SDSU has been having a lot of success with lately. Given a choice between a kid with all the measurables but modest productivity, and a kid without great measurables but with great productivity, I'll take the latter most of the time. Given the already excellent performance of the class of 2008, and the rumored potential of the class of 2009, I can't second-guess Mussman as an evaluator of talent.

Cameron was both in high school, but I guess I don't know for certain whether it was contemplated that he would concentrate on punting at the college level. This is strictly a guess, but it wouldn't surprise me if Cameron punts and maybe kicks off, but Miller handles the extra points and field goals.

In addition to SDSU, there's another former UND opponent that recently moved up and is experiencing early success at the dI level. Remember Florida Gulf Coast, UND's opponent at the 2007 Elite 8? They went 26-5 last year, and made the WNIT. They're 4-2 so far this year. Sagarin has them at number 94 right now--10 spots below SDSU.

There will likely be a competition for the kicker job between Cameron and Zeb Miller.