UND92,96

Herald reporter Tom Miller has a new blog that will include some UND football talk.

Considering Ben Jacobson is a UND grad and is from the area, I would think the chances are pretty good UNI will be coming to GF within the next few years. I know there was some resentment in certain circles when he left UND, but I would hope that's all water under the bridge now.

The Appalachian State-LSU/Michigan games occurred to me also after reading Hammersmith's post. Other examples this year are Northern Iowa playing pre season #17 BYU, and Cal Poly playing pre season #12 Wisconsin.

To the extent people think UND is biting off more than it can chew by playing Texas Tech next year, how about what the Citadel is doing this year? They are a borderline top-25 FCS team, and they are playing both pre-season #5 Florida AND #9 Clemson!

Notes and quotes from the first practice.

No guts, no glory. I wonder if UC-Davis regrets playing Stanford back in 2005? Or for that matter, how about a certain dII school playing Montana back in 2003? Whether UND is competitive or gets completely blown out isn't the point. We have basically nothing to play for over the next four years, so these types of games make perfect sense. And it will be a nice paycheck to boot.

Any word as to why Reynolds has apparently not been added to the roster yet?

Tech plays a couple of pretty strong FCS programs this year--UMass and Eastern Washington--so it will be interesting to see how those teams fare.

Was Rosario a no-show? I still don't see his name on the roster.

It's being updated right now. I suspect the full roster will be up within about 10 minutes.

IMO, that's why the return of Brewster is so huge. It appears that there are going to be at least three or four scholarships available for next year, and we definitely need to add some impact players.

The new roster has been posted.

It's somewhat interesting to look back at this thread. It was a pretty big risk to hire someone with so little experience, and obviously the concerns turned out to justified.

Even though it appears that perhaps Raphael Reynolds may become the primary return man, I could still see Bamba as potentially the other kick returner, assuming UND continues to have two guys deep like Dressler and Chappell were last year.

I went to law school back in the mid-1990's with a guy who played Canadian college football and who did some volunteer coaching at UND, and he told me several times that UND should try to establish a recruiting presence in the Montreal area, because there was a lot of talent there. It took awhile for it to come to fruition, but it looks like he may have been prophetic. It will be interesting to see if UND can pluck one or two from that area every few years.

That is great news. It usually seems to be USD that picks up stud transfer or older-than-average running backs seemingly out of nowhere, and it would be nice if UND could pull that off for a change. We'll have to wait and see how this turns out, but I do like the fact that Mussman seems to be more aggressive in pursuing transfers and Canadians (e.g. Bamba and Fonseca) than Dale Lennon was.

I agree. I'm generally much more worried when there's a new starting quarterback than when there's a new starting running back. Murray is more than capable, and even if Brady's injury problems continue, there's still Solum, and possibly Sutton and the new juco (if that turns out to be true). Anything we get out of walk-ons Battle and Dungy is gravy.

According to the media guide, it was installed prior to the 1998 season.

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If Reynolds does indeed end up at UND and is eligible to play this coming season, I would think this would make red-shirting Bamba and Sutton all but assured. I had thought Bamba may not red-shirt due to the returner positions appearing to be pretty wide open, and if any of the three scholarship backs on the roster (Murray, Brady and Solum) become or already are injured, Sutton may have almost had to play this year barring a late addition such as Reynolds.

I have no idea whether or not this is true, but Reynolds rushed for over 1000 yards last season for a pretty good California juco team. You have to wonder why he'd still be available, though.

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My mistake--it was actually Jordan Mertens who I was looking at in the box score from Wednesday's game. In my defense, there are lot of Jordan's and Mertens playing ball in North Dakota these days, and it's hard not to mix some of them up. I guess neither Allard nor May played.

May isn't playing in these games. Allard scored 4 points last night. The teams will play again tonight in Fargo.

Pretty sad. I just can't understand why this continues to be such a glaring problem year after year.