UND92,96

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.

Although the on-court success was relatively modest, I think UND was on the right track in terms of recruiting high school players in the mid-90's when Mustard, Reinke, Travis, Larson, Behrens and Tom Jacobson were all brought in. I'm not sure why we got more heavily into juco recruiting after those guys graduated. Maybe because the 1999-2000 season, which on paper should have been the best team since the Elite 8 teams of the early 90's, didn't do quite as well as hoped and it was thought that the only way to get over the hump was to roll the dice with talented--but in many cases undisciplined and/or academically challenged--juco players. In any event, I think that unless there's a Rico-type kid out there, or perhaps somebody who is playing at Wahpeton, Lake Region or Williston and knows what he's getting into with regard to the ND winters, recruiting jucos probably isn't the best idea.

I think he was from Crary.

If he's a 4.0 student, I would think UND could put together an offer that would be at least very close to a full ride between football scholarship money and academic scholarship money. Being able to offer a full football scholarship is the one area where being I-AA really gives NDSU a distinct advantage. I'm surprised SCSU would even bother recruiting in this neck of the woods as it's almost unheard of for a high-quality local kid to go anywhere but UND or NDSU unless he's going I-A.

I agree that it's extremely difficult for an NCC school to win a national title in men's basketball. That makes our failure to do it in the 1990-91 season all the more painful because we probably had the best team that year. I feel that region titles are a more realistic goal for NCC teams than are national titles, but with Metro's success with Australian and other foreign born players, even that will be difficult--at least until their coach decides to move on. I think we're better off just recruiting the best high school talent possible from ND, MN and Wisconsin, plus the occasional dI bounceback kid (Guldseth, Jacobson, Koenig, etc.), and recruit only juco kids whose character is very high, e.g. Rico Burkett.

I believe UND and SDSU both have eight.

It's not easy to stay interested, but I'm trying. I thought it might be interesting to compare Rich Glas's record during the five years with Greg McDermott, to his record since Mac left. Here are the numbers: with Mac overall record 126-37 (.773) NCC record 65-25 (.722) NCC titles 2 (both outright) NCAA appearances 5 Elite 8 appearances 2 since Mac left overall record 192-123 (.609) NCC record 98-88 (.527) NCC titles 1 (shared) NCAA appearances 3 Elite 8 appearances 0

There was a short article on UND football in the Herald today (not available online), and listed as "newcomers to watch" for next season were offensive lineman Kyle Bondy, running back Ryan Chappell, receivers Brady Trenbeath, Kenley Wahlin and Nate Rambeck, tight end Marcus Tibesar, defensive linemen Chris Nelessen and Nate Wayne, linebackers Bobby Stroup and Andy Miller, and kicker Brandon Hellevang.

Not to overlook tomorrow's game vs. UMC, but the game on Tuesday should be a big challenge. Northern State is off to a 6-0 start including a 20-point win over USD. On paper, they really don't have anywhere near the talent of the Sioux, but I'm sure they'll be confident considering last year's debacle at the Betty (UND blew a 20-point lead in the second half and lost). I have to think UND will be extremely fired up for this one, and will hopefully send a message that everybody else in the region will be playing for second place this year.