UND92,96

Freund for about 7 on the run.

3rd and 23 coming up...punt upcoming.

13 yard loss!

TD Dressler!

You've got to be kidding me. What happened to our run defense? Second time this year we've allowed a 200 yard rusher.

My understanding is that USD has had a problem with stupid penalties all year.

Hats off to UNO--unbelievable season so far.

Weird/surprising stat of the day--UND and USD combined have just two wins against teams with a winning record (UND over CWU, and USD over Winona State).

Unfortunately, besides regular viewers of this board a lot of people didn't recognize some pretty obvious red flags with regard to Buning's performance, such as Bollinger's quick departure from his associate a.d. position, the rather tacky (in terms of timing) handling of the Rivard situation, the insult of UND basketball fans who wanted consideration given to some local candidates ("they don't have UND's best interests at heart"), the offer of the men's basketball job to Herbst (followed by a quick retraction), the near-loss of Lennon, the long delay in the previously promised field turf at Memorial (not coincidentally done right after Lennon decided to stay), the jerking around of Steve Johnson (why was he encouraged to apply if he supposedly wasn't qualified?) and the Hakstol contract saga, among others. The writing was on the wall for some time. Maybe the handling of Buning's departure was less than perfect, but the departure in and of itself should not have come as a big surprise and was justified, IMO.

Congrats to a league-high eight UND football players (Braeglemann, Dressler, Freund, Trenbeath, Miller, Tescher, Manke and Alexander) who made the academic all-NCC team! link

Bob Eblen (RD17) from d2football.com has picked USD to win 31-28.

Herald article on the a.d. search: [url="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=56532

To provide a little perspective, it cost Nebraska $2.2 million to buy out former a.d. Steve Pederson's contract. link. Nebraska's budget is between six and seven times that of UND, so by comparison UND didn't do too badly with the Buning buyout.

In this [url="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=56429

You certainly may be right about that, although I can't help but wonder why it would have taken him that long to realize that the UND salary was not going to be enough to warrant a move. In other words, I would assume the general salary range was known well before he withdrew from consideration. With that said, I certainly would consider him to be a good candidate should be choose to apply again. Molde does have considerable administrative experience, and he has dI experience in that he was a longtime head football coach at Western Michigan.

Of course other candidates will be looked at, it's just difficult for those of us outside the inner circle to give an educated guess about who may be interested. One guy who I've thought about is the Winona State a.d. That athletic department has obviously done quite well, particularly considering it has a pretty modest budget.

If Rich were interested in getting into administration, I believe he could have done so at UND a couple of years ago once it became clear that continuing as basketball coach wasn't in the cards. Evidently, he declined and wanted to remain in coaching in some capacity.

There is some speculation that the last time around, he was using the UND job as leverage to get a raise at Gustavus, and I believe it worked.

Here's Kevin Fee's list of possible candidates with local connections, all of whom have been previously mentioned on this board. link

This isn't based on any inside information, and is simply my opinion, but if we assume Buning's salary was $123,000, that he wasn't paid during his LOA, and that his contract runs through July 30, he would have been due at most 10 and a half months' salary, or about $107,625. It's quite possible that some deep pocketed alum promised that he would pay that, plus an extra $40,000 or so, to simply make this go away instead of delaying things further with a few more weeks of LOA, plus potential litigation and the resulting costs. It does bother me to an extent that he's getting as much as he is, because 14 months' salary seems excessive for somebody who allegedly was not doing a good job and who presumably only had another approximately nine months remaining on his contract, but I don't think in any way does this mean that UND is admitting any sort of fault.

UND reportedly will be playing at McNeese State next year.

I'm looking at this from the angle that our list of choices may not be what they otherwise would be due to the timing, specifically the uncertainty about the identity of the new president. If we can get an experienced administrator, then great. I'm all for Rob Bollinger, for example. But if some or even all of the obvious candidates are scared off, I'd rather have somebody like Blais than some assistant a.d. who may not realize what he or she is really getting into here. IMO, Buning fell into the latter category. We won't really know until we see the list of applicants. I just don't want to dismiss somebody of the stature of Dean Blais without knowing who else may be interested.

Is his experience really all that much different from that of Wisconsin a.d. Barry Alvarez? That's not to say that Blais is interested, or should get the job even if he is, but I'm not sure his work experience should automatically exclude him, either.

At least eight candidates will be interviewed, including Smith, Elbert and Weisenstein: [url="http://www.grandforksherald.com/articles/index.cfm?id=56204