UND92,96

I'm almost positive he was named scout offensive player of the week at least once, so presumably he practiced all year. I have to think he was medically cleared to play prior to this past season.

What will UND do about Concordia-St. Paul's number 3 (the guard who burned us last year going one-on-one)? She's the only big weapon that CSP returns. I would assume Jahner will start out on her, but Beck and Guinn will probably also take a turn, and there needs to be a lot of helping out.

From allcanadagridiron.com: C'mon, who'd want to go to school in Hawaii or Florida if you can go to UND?

According to Jeff Kolpack, NDSU is starting to turn away from the Big Sky as realistic conference option. [url="http://www.in-forum.com/articles/index.cfm?id=110192

Good points, Sicatoka. I'm excited about the big-play potential next year with Manke playing full time (hopefully), getting Strouth's speed back, adding the speed of Chappell, and the plethora of good young receivers such as Caufield, Trenbeath, Nicholas, Wahlin and Rambeck, not to mention Mr. Dressler, Groeschl, Loegering and Tatom. There will be a lot of competition for playing time amongst all those receivers. Wahlin is a very athletic 6'3" and can be a big weapon on jump balls and fades. I'm not sure what to expect with the offensive line, but a healthy Braegelmann (hopefully) and Troen are a pair of very good sophomores to build around. Kusler is solid, and between Bauer, Bronson and some of the younger guys, I'm hopeful we can put together a solid group.

While this may seem trivial, my other beef with the NCC is why it had to make UND go to Central Washington, not to mention making Western come to Grand Forks, two years in a row. Would it really have been that difficult to reverse those two games?

Mesa State was 5-6 this year, after a disastrous 0-11 2004. If this schedule is accurate, I think we could have done better in terms of finding a team for a home-and-home arrangement. And if we have to go to a 5 home, 5 road schedule, money must be pretty tight.

With the NCAA's policy regarding Native American monickers obviously meaning UND won't be hosting any more playoff games (barring a successful appeal or litigation), does that, or should that change the way we schedule? Specifically, should we consider scheduling a game vs. a I-AA team (on the road, of course) since a loss wouldn't be that costly (see UMD's loss to Northern Iowa not keeping them out of the playoffs), and it would potentially be a decent payday? I think playing a Northern Iowa or a Montana on the road would be interesting.

Here's confirmation that Minnesota is indeed interested in Anderson. Whether he gets a scholarship offer remains to be seen.

I realize Nelson was a very good player in high school. I would have liked to see him at UND. But it would seem that he simply wasn't recruited very hard, if at all, by UND, or for that matter anybody else in the NCC. To the best of my knowledge, it was a similar story with all the other ND kids in the 90's who flourished at Northern. Perhaps the Northern coaching staff simply has a better eye for talent than most coaches, I don't know. I guess my real question is whether Northern is actually winning recruiting battles with USD, UND, etc., or whether, as speculated above, that they simply have a better eye for talent and are winning with players who may have been overlooked by bigger schools?

This is the kind of game we've struggled with in recent years. Games against good but certainly not great teams on the road in the first half of the season have spelled trouble. Fortunately, with the tremendous depth and abundance of scoring threats UND has, I don't foresee any more losses to teams like Northern, Southwest, Omaha or Augie in the near future. If there's a better team in dII than the Sioux, I'd be very surprised.

I think it's interesting that Northern has only one transfer on the roster, and he barely plays. I have always been under the impression that Northern gets mostly high school recruits thought to be not quite good enough for the NCC schools to heavily recruit, e.g. Craig Nelson and Adam Grant. Is this still the case, or were some of their better players considered to be very good prospects coming out of high school? Anybody know?

Tesch has publicly stated in the past that he's not interested in playing fully-funded NCC teams. Maybe their success vs. Mankato the past few years will change his mind, as even though Mankato isn't fully-funded, they're probably in the high 20's or low 30's in terms of number of scholarships.

Another kid who may be a prospect is Jake Krause from Moorhead. He was named second team A.P. all-state as a wide receiver. Have any of you guys in the F-M area seen him play?

Gratzek named second team all state as an offensive lineman by the Associated Press. Another kid who made the all state team and who is apparently on UND's radar is Ty Boyle of International Falls. link

I think he should get a hardship. The rule is that the injury must have occurred prior to the student-athlete playing in more than 20% of scheduled games in that season. Since the West Chester game was the second of 11 scheduled games, I don't think there should be a big problem.

With the apparent budget deficit, I wonder if paying guarantees for home non-conference games will be a thing of the past for at least the next few years? We may be looking at all home-and-home arrangements for non-conference games?

Regarding Boschee, according to this article, his final three choices were Kansas, Arizona and Minnesota.

I'm not 100% sure we can count on the location of all NCC games being reversed from this year's schedule. Somebody on the d2football.com board thought two of SCSU's games would be the same as this year. I don't know why the NCC would do that since it would be easy enough to simply reverse all NCC games from this year, and then add the two Washington schools as one home and one road. In any event, there should be just two games left to schedule for UND since Winona will be coming here, and with the two Washington schools that will be eight conference games. I wouldn't mind seeing Concordia-St. Paul on the schedule, as they'll likely finish above .700, thereby helping out our quality win index. But they seem to only want to play NCC teams they think they can beat, i.e. Augie and Mankato. They have traditionally played UMD also, but that could change now that the Bulldogs are one of the stronger NCC teams.

I think the problem with UND's recruitment of juco players since the late 90's is that very few have actually turned out to be impact players (all conference types), and furthermore, the number of wins really hasn't gone up during that time. By my count, there have been approximately 13 jucos brought in since 1999--Munlin, Beasley, Lolar, Porter, Allen, Franklin, Stoute, Jenkins, Nobles, Parks, Swan, Austin (local kid but still technically a juco), Phillips and Miller. I probably missed one or two, also. In any event, just seven of them actually lasted two full years in the program, and only Jerome turned out to be an all-conference player. I'm sure several of the aforementioned players are good guys, and certainly not all of them were expected to be stars, but we're not exactly doing well in terms of signing players who stay for two years, nor are we doing well in terms of finding players whose on-court results match their expected (or at least hoped) level of play.

I would tend to agree. Not to say it's impossible that he'd go to Minnesota, but if the Gophers are really interested, it would have to be a recent thing (within the past month), since Anderson himself told the Herald about a month ago that UND and NDSU were the two schools he's considering.

I'm curious as to whether anybody thinks we should consider Craig Nelson from May-Port as another "miss" in terms of ND kids who UND probably could have had? He's only a red-shirt sophomore for Northern, and is already starting for his second year and is averaging a very respectable 9.7 points and 4 assists per game.

Regarding Bagaason, what surprises me is that she's actually been playing some at the point. I had thought her role would be as a zone-buster (we all know UND will see a lot of zone this year) as she's a very good shooter. Langen hasn't had the best of starts, but how much of that is due to other teams focusing their defense on stopping the inside game, I don't know. She's missed a lot more easy shots than she did last year, but she's still shooting a very high percentage from the free throw line so I have to think her field goal percentage will start going up soon. Ledger definitely had her best game of the year yesterday. I can see her being a Kami Winger type player for the next four years. You don't find big, physically strong girls who can jump like she can very often. At the point next year, I would look for Jossy Bergan to have a good chance of starting there. She's a true point guard--something none of the returnees next year will be.

Here's kind of an impressive stat for Kimbrough: 13.6 points per game in just 16.5 minutes per game! Starter or not, is there any doubt she'd be in the game in crunch time if UND absolutely had to have a basket?

He's 6'3" and somewhere in the 210 range. His top-end speed is very good, but I doubt his 40 time is anything spectacular judging by what I saw of him in the 100 meters last spring. He'd invariably be last or at least close to last for the first 20-30 meters, but then run down everybody by the end of the race. As far as his recruitment is concerned, let's hope Oksendahl, Trenbeath and Sundby are very persuasive.