UND92,96

Assuming that the two years left on Jones' contract buy him another year, is there much question that his future at UND is pretty much dependent upon Crandall and Seales being difference-makers immediately? And by difference-makers, I mean being clearly better than Tyler and DeRouen were this year. I just don't see much hope that the other returnees' improvement is going to be enough for UND to rise all that much in the standings.

UND finally finishes off Ohio St. in triple OT, 2-1.

UND now 4-13. And while a person could emphasize the fact that a lot of the losses have been pretty close, conversely you could also say that of the four wins, only one of which would UND likely have much of a chance if the game were to be replayed today, and that's the home win over Idaho St. And even that's probably not better than 50-50.

I just saw a pic on twitter. I also recognized Dave Rettker and Burke Barlow. There was one or two I did not recognize. Hey, it's been 20 years.

Which players are there?

Women's basketball can offer 15 scholarships. There are currently three seniors. UND signed six players in the fall, and I have to assume Grace Coughlin will be on scholarship, as well. So I'm not sure whether that means not all underclassmen on scholarship right now will be returning next year, not all of the 15 scholarships were actually used this year, or not all of the signees are going to be on scholarship? Keep in mind that unlike in division II, there is no splitting of scholarships.

I have been hearing about this kid as a basketball prospect for a few years, but he really hasn't put up the kind of numbers I'd expect from a division II prospect, let alone a borderline division I prospect. Does he have any basketball offers yet?

The following is each school's overall Big Sky record over the last almost three full years, minus Idaho. 43-13 Montana 38-17 Weber St. 31-24 Northern Arizona 30-25 Sac. St. 29-26 Eastern Washington 29-27 Northern Colorado 28-28 UND 24-31 Portland St. 23-33 Montana St. 16-39 Idaho St. 14-41 Southern Utah

I'm guessing you've seen Freije play before. Is her game at all similar to Madi Buck's?

Let's just say I cared a lot more back then. Where are they now?: Tom Brown--remained as an assistant at Winona State for eight more years, before finally getting a head coaching job at division II West Texas A & M this past spring. Steve Weemer--continued to coach high school basketball in Illinois until 2013. Apparently out of coaching altogether now. Randall Herbst--went on to a pretty successful two-year stint as head coach at University of Mary, before leaving to take an assistant coaching job at Omaha, where he remains today.

I was pretty opinionated back then. Guess I've mellowed a bit in the past decade.

I wouldn't mind if Jones could find a guy like Kaluna (sp?) from NAU. He has done O.K. finding taller skinny guys who hopefully will eventually gain weight/strength, but it would be nice if he could find an offensive tackle type once in awhile, too, even if he's only 6'6" or so.

I too would like to see more playing time for Shields and possibly Coleman, but Antwi is actually playing the best basketball of his career right now, and I would hate to see him play any less than what he has been.

I don't want to get too far off topic, but my theory is that girls from economically disadvantaged households are far less likely to participate in sports than boys from similar households. And let's be honest, the north end of Grand Forks is far more economically disadvantaged than the far south end. The fact that Red River has been better than Central in virtually every girls sport pretty much every year for as far back as I can remember can't be a coincidence.

I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of the players on Grand Forks' team are from Red River. If Central could field a team, it would. But the reality is that the way the high school district boundary is drawn in Grand Forks makes it a challenge for Central to be competitive in a lot of sports, particularly on the girls side.

You are correct. Even if the school does release the student, generally speaking that student must still sit out a year if he/she transfers to another division I school. A coach being fired (or leaving for another job) is typically not an exception to the rule. I believe the exception would be in the case of a major NCAA investigation/violation, such as what occurred with the Penn St. football program a few years back.

Freije scored 32 points last night to lead her team into the region title game: http://www.grandforksherald.com/sports/prep-sports/3686754-girls-basketball-lakota-edmore-north-star-advance It will be interesting to see how she does against Kvilvang, who hopefully will eventually be a UND recruit in either volleyball or basketball.

The reality is that Brew has pretty much only brought in one real contributor (so far) in each of his first three high school recruiting classes. He needs to do better than that. Yes, some of those who haven't contributed yet could still do so, but generally speaking if a player hasn't shown anything in her first two years, it's never going to happen.

I attribute most of it to the extremely schizophrenic nature of that group. They were generally very good at home, but mostly struggled on the road. And that was never more evident than in 2011-12, when they were 13-1 at home, and 2-14 on the road.

The high-quality wins have been quite few and far between. To me, the three best wins of the Jones era have been, in no particular order: 1) Montana (won Big Sky) in 2011-12; 2) SDSU (won Summit) in 2011-12 (but UND also lost by about 40 in the other matchup with the Jackrabbits that season); and 3) NDSU in 2013-14. The two nice wins in 2011-12, when the core group of the team were sophomores, were a big part of the reason many were pretty disappointed in UND's inability to beat the top team or two in the Big Sky at home in either 2012-13 or 2013-14.

The weird thing is that Jones actually did a pretty good job of finding bigs early on when it should have been more difficult due to the transition (Mitchell, Wilmer, Brekke), but he really struggled to find replacements for those guys when UND was coming out of the transition and it should have been easier to recruit.

I think it's been an issue of not having much quality depth. Lloyd, Evers, Lauck, Dyer and Szabla can all score, but nobody else has shown much of an ability to put up points on a semi-regular basis, and the outside shooting has been pretty erratic. The good news is that there does appear to be a very good recruiting class coming in. But there will be pressure on several of them to step up immediately, because frankly from what I've seen, there are a lot of freshman and sophomore scholarship players who have a long way to go, particularly offensively, before they can be counted on to be part of the regular rotation.

IMO, UND's Big Sky performance in 2012-13 was better than 2013-14. In 2012-13, there were two legitimately good teams, and then everybody else. In its first year, UND managed to be the best of everybody else and finished with a 12-8 conference record. I felt like that was a reasonably successful debut, although there may have been some disappointment given the fact that UND had beaten Montana, the conference champion, in 2011-12 but was winless against Montana and Weber in 2012-13. Last year, the league arguably didn't have any really good teams, and UND returned essentially everybody (although obviously Brekke was lost early on). I would argue that UND really should have been able to improve upon its 12-8 record from the year before, but it did not. And at worst, UND should have managed to finish the regular season alone in second place, rather than being part of a three-way tie. And it would have, but for the end-of-the-season loss at SUU--a team that finished 1-19 in the league.

Is Ahelegbe considered the number one assistant at USD? I had just assumed it was Hansen, based upon their respective years of coaching experience. I believe Hansen was the number one assistant under Nagy at SDSU, before moving on to Northern Colorado and then USD. He also worked for several years under Margenthaler at Mankato (during which time Ahelegbe played there) prior to SDSU.

I agree that he would be a nice candidate for any midwestern low to mid major head coaching job.