UND92,96

The good: -yet another win over USD; -Sutton and Bamba are legit playmakers, and Landry played his best game thus far; -offensive line took a huge step forward; -goal line stand late in the fourth quarter was huge; -blocked two extra points; -very good attendance. The not-so-good: -Boyle's injury; -still had some tackling problems; -far too many rushing yards allowed; -almost no pass rush; -kicking game was sub-par today with a missed field goal, a high snap resulting in an unsucessful PAT, and two kickoffs out of bounds. Overall the good far exceeded the bad--a very good day!

Even Wayne Nelson is picking USD: http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/135811/ USD was coming off a good win the week prior to playing UND last year too (a 42-20 win at Southern Utah, possibly the only relatively high-quality road win of Meierkort's USD career), and we know how much that ended up mattering.

2009-2010 SCHEDULE 09/05/09 at Arizona State Tempe, AZ L, 50-3 09/12/09 at Oklahoma Norman, OK L, 64-0 09/19/09 at Weber State * Ogden, UT L, 44-17 09/26/09 vs. Central Washington Pocatello, ID L, 33-22 This program is an absolute mess. They're a terrible team year after year; they're showing no visible signs of improvement; and they're apparently also desperate for money. Quite a combination.

Yes, that was me, although I can't really remember what the e-mail said.

According to UND, 12,287 is a sellout. There are 18 suites--some have 12 seats, and some have 18 seats, according to the Alerus Center web site. If it's like the Ralph, there's room for a lot more people in the suites than just the 12 or 18, but the the web site doesn't give a total capacity for the suites to my knowledge. The web site still lists football capacity as 13,500. It doesn't seem like the discrepancy (1213) can be entirely attributed to the suites. It's possible that the standing-room areas behind both end zones may be included in the 13,500 number, although I have no idea if standing-room tickets are actually sold.

I'm fairly certain that it doesn't.

If we lose by four scores, on our home field, to an opponent we've owned for most of the past 20 years, a week after being embarrassed, it will be the low water point for the program since the late 1980's IMO. I don't see it happening. USD has a lot to prove before they should be heavily favored on the road against any halfway decent scholarship FCS program.

I have no idea how many walk-up tickets are generally sold, but I have to think it's pretty substantial. If the student tickets are all spoken for, I think that's a good sign, and selling close to 2000 today and tomorrow (mostly tomorrow) is probably pretty realistic. I think 12,000 is about right.

The thing about USD's team that strikes me as odd is the fact that they use a position player--one of their receivers who actually plays a lot--as their kicker. That's something you almost never see at this level of football. I really hope Shepard becomes the only quarterback I can ever recall who went 0-4 as a starter against UND. I wouldn't be surprised if that's never happened before.

I swear that guy has been at UND for something like 10 years. He's another John Hoff!

So there were roughly 50 people protesting today. Of that group, apparently there were two AIM members brought in, plus an NDSU professor, Erich Longie and David Gipp. I think it's probably safe to say that Ganje, Annis, Ketterling, Grijalva and Jeanotte were probably there, since they live for this type of thing. So that leaves roughly 40 people. And there are reportedly 340 (give or take) Native American students at UND. Even if the other 40 people at the protest were students--and I highly doubt most of them were--that seems like a very small percentage of UND Native American students, doesn't it?

I see this offense in a similar light to teams like Winona State or Augie when they gave UND problems--perhaps a bit under-sized on the o-line, so they used a lot of short passes and misdirection, with the occasional deep ball. I think there are enough weapons with Bamba, Sutton, Konrath and perhaps Davis to be pretty effective doing this.

From what I can tell without having actually seen the team play in person, we may need to be a pass-to-set-up-the-run-type offense. It just doesn't seem that we have a big or physical enough offensive line to overpower many teams with the running game like we've done so often in the past.

Game Notes

A few numbers: offense 3.0 yards per rush; has yet to exceed 300 yards in a game; has had just nine drives of 30 or more yards. defense 41 ppg; 507 ypg; just one sack. Obviously the SFA game heavily skews the defensive numbers, but they are what they are. I don't have any answers as far as exactly what's wrong. It's been a struggle for several years now. I'm afraid the offense will likely continue to struggle this year, but should get better when the offensive line gets bigger and more talented next year (hopefully). Also, the receiving corps should be deeper and faster next year.

As embarrassing as it is to lose as badly as UND did last night, the reality is that something like this seems to happen at least once to every school during the first two or three years of their transition: SDSU 2004 52 UC-Davis 0 SDSU 63 Georgia Southern 7 SDSU 2006 17 Wisconsin-LaCrosse 3 SDSU NDSU 2005 37 Cal Poly 6 NDSU USD 2009 66 N. Iowa 7 USD

Certainly having Chappell and Murray would help, but whether the o-line could open any holes for them to run through is another question.

The really unfortunate thing is that the class of 2005 had the potential to be really good, but a combination of the early departures of probably the two best players (Chappell and Stroup) along with several others who had outstanding credentials but who simply didn't pan out has led to the sr. class not being especially strong. The class of 2006 is probably about what one would expect given the circumstances at the time they were recruited, i.e. the uncertainty about whether we were staying dII or going dI. Then there was the class of 2007, of which there's almost nobody left besides Hawkins, Saporu, Ankenbauer and Bellmore, and you have back-to-back-to-back classes that simply aren't as good as what we've been used to. That puts a lot of pressure on the classes of 2008 and 2009.

The SFA quarterback threw five picks against SMU, which is one of the 20 worst FBS teams in the country according to Sagarin. I understand SFA also struggles to cover kicks/punts. I'm looking for another big day from Schwenzfeier, and UND's special teams will again prove to be the difference, with Bamba having at least one big kick return. This is also the week that the playbook gets opened up, and we see a significant improvement from the offense. 31 UND 27 SFA

Brock Nelson has committed to UND: http://www.areavoices.com/undhockey/

I just read the transcript from Mick Garry's weekly USD chat on the Argus Leader web page, and he picked a score of 34-10 in the UND-USF game. No word on which team was going to have the 34, though.

Good news--the receiving corps just got deeper: http://www.areavoices.com/waynenelson/

Would you say Sioux Falls is somewhat like some of the Winona teams of the early 2000's--little depth and some pretty big weaknesses but enough skill position players to stay with deeper and more talented teams?

Not too many people will probably get the joke, but that's funny! Here's our logo: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5...eCornPoster.jpg

It would be more intimidating if it was being brandished by somebody out of the classically bad movie "Children of the Corn."