UND92,96

Certainly the punt return team deserves a lot of credit for blocking well. But before we give them all or even most of the credit, let's remember that Groeschl was returning punts the first few games of the year, and he wasn't doing anything resembling what Dressler is now doing. Either the punt return team all of a sudden started blocking much better, or Dressler can do things that probably nobody else on the team can. I suspect it's the latter.

If UND does finish at 9-1 but doesn't get one of the top two seeds, my recommendation for future years would be to schedule as many NSIC teams in the non-conference schedule as possible. Playing Bemidji St., Concordia-SP and either Northern St. or SW St. (along with Winona St., which I believe is already on the schedule for the next two years) may not seem very appealing to some fans, but at least it would potentially give UND the same benefit Winona St. gets by beating some of these weak teams that happen to have pretty good records.

My biggest beef with the SSI is that Winona St. will likely get 14 points each for beating Bemidji St. and Concordia-SP, which frankly is absurd considering how those two teams would stack up against the top four teams in either the NCC or GLIAC. Winona is a good program, I'm not criticizing them, but they play in an incredibly weak conference and are actually rewarded for it. Their only difficult game all year was SDSU, which they lost. I'm not sure I have a better system, aside from just scrapping the whole thing and going back to the old system, which while imperfect was certainly not any LESS accurate.

What about women's track/cc?

I do realize that it's highly unlikely that UND is currently fully funding all of the women's sports. For the purposes of the computations, I had to assume something since I'm not privy to the exact scholarship numbers at present. Also, with regard to women's hockey, I didn't address that since once it does get to fully-funded status, it should cancel out men's hockey, just as women's basketball does with men's basketball. Regarding the swimming scholarship limits, I got the info from this link. I can't vouch for its accuracy, however.

Why do I have the crazy idea that you're pulling those numbers out of a certain part of your anatomy?

I understand what you're saying, although with Minnesota the problem has more to do with the Metrodome rather than all the other entertainment options, IMO. And I'm certainly not denying that there is a fairly large UND contingent in Fargo-Moorhead. I just think that it stands to reason that if you take two areas in which one school's sports are king--NDSU in Fargo and UND in Grand Forks--the school in the city with essentially twice the population is going to have an advantage in terms of being able to draw crowds. Why it hasn't necessarily been the same story with basketball is an unknown to me.

So which part of what I posted isn't true? I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote.

My point was simply that if you're comparing which football team is more popular in the state of ND, UND or NDSU, NDSU has a big advantage because 20% of ND's population lives in Cass County. So regardless of the allegiances of the rest of the state, NDSU will likely have more fans due simply to the fact that the Fargo area is so much bigger than any other city in ND. It will likely be able to draw a lot of fans from Fargo who perhaps grew up elsewhere and had no allegiance prior to moving to Fargo but would be far more likely to follow the local team rather than one 75 miles away. Similarly, if somebody moves to Grand Forks from outside the area, chances are that they will follow UND more closely. The difference is that Fargo-Moorhead has far more of these types of people from which to draw from.

I don't recall anybody saying that there's not enough people in this area to fill the arena. In my opinion, it should be full every week. However, you could certainly make the same claim that the Fargodome should be full or nearly full with 180,000 people in the area or whatever the combined population of Cass and Clay counties is. And although 14,000 is nothing to be ashamed of, that still leaves roughly 4000 to 5000 empty seats every game. Both schools are averaging about 75% capacity.

A little quick research reveals the following: We know the difference between dII and I-AA football is 27 scholarships, so how would the equivalent of 27 scholarships be added to the women's side? I don't know which of these sports are currently funded at the dII maximum, but assuming for the sake of these computations that they all are, it would break down as follows: soccer would go from 9.9 (dII max) to 12 (dI max) tennis would go from 6 to 8 volleyball would go from 8 to 12 That adds up to an additional 8.1 scholarships. For the following sports in which there are both men's and women's programs, if the women's side increased its scholies but the men's side did not, the following additions would be made: cross country/track would go from 12.6 to 18 swimming/diving would stay the same (8.1 is the limit for both dI and dII for some odd reason) golf would go from 5.4 to 6 softball would go from 7.2 to 12 That's an additional 10.8, which is added to the 8.1 for a total of 18.9. That would leave a total of 8.1 which would still need to be accounted for. Since the addition of another women's sport would likely be cost-prohibitive, and UND has already pretty much already added every women's sport for which there is any real interest, that would probably mean the cutting of one or two men's sports. I'm not advocating it, but I'm afraid that it would be inevitable if UND were to decide to go dI. Obviously I am not getting into the issue of where all this money would come from; rather, this is simply how I would see the Title IX issue being addressed.

With Cass County making up approximately 20% of ND's population, NDSU obviously has a pretty large advantage over UND in terms of a potential fan base within short driving distance. What would be interesting, at least to me, would be whether the rest of the state--exluding Cass and GF counties--would self identify themselves as more of a UND or NDSU football fan. UND has the advantage of having a larger alumni base, and more success over the past 10-12 years. NDSU has the dI factor, plus considerable success, albeit much of it coming 15-20 years ago. Those of you who live in or are from central or western ND would be in a far better position than I to speculate on this.

It's highly questionable whether they actually NEED more seats, but the capacity is currently only 6500 according to their web site. On occasion, they do draw more than that. Their largest crowd ever was somewhere in the 7500 range. On average, since Nottingham Field opened, I think they've averaged perhaps one game per year with a crowd between 6500 and 7500.

I have a feeling that whichever team gets the number one seed in the NW Region, and therefore won't need to travel, is going to have an even bigger advantage than usual. Road wins between teams ranked in the region have been very tough to come by this year. Of the probable top eight teams in the region right now (in no particular order)--UND, SCSU, USD, UNO, Winona St., GVSU, Mich. Tech and Northwood--I believe there's a grand total of one home loss.

UNC will likely always struggle with low attendance. For football, they typically average in the 5000 range, and in basketball, it's typically well under 1000. If winning a couple of national championships in dII football, plus the novelty of going dI hasn't been enough for them to draw better than they have the past couple of years, I don't think it's ever going to happen for them.

To this point, is this the best UND defense ever, or at least the best one in the Thomas/Lennon era? The last three regular season games will likely determine how this defense stacks up all-time, but I don't think a Sioux defense has ever played better over the first seven games of a season. Even the 1999 and 2001 teams had games in which they gave up 28 points in a game by this point in the season. I know the competition level is not necessarily the same now as it was then, but any way you slice it this defense has been incredible thus far.

Talk about overdoing things, how about playing that Limp Bizkit song ("Rollin'") after every single Roland carry? It was clever the first couple of times, but when it's played even after a 5-yard loss, that's really over-the-top.

Shutouts are never easy. Not only does the defense have to play great, but you have to be somewhat fortunate in not giving up any defensive or special teams scores. That blocked punt by UMD could easily have been a td had the ball bounced a little differently. I also think it's significant that none of the three teams UND has shut out has been shut out by anybody else this season. It's tough to do much better than UND's scoring defense of just 7.71 points per game, which will rank the Sioux number 1 in the nation in that category when the new stats come out this week.

It looks like Wayne Nelson of the Herald more or less agrees with you, as he picked UND to win 35-14. I'm having a hard time seeing UMD scoring in double figures, unless it's via defensive or special teams scores. As RD17 pointed out, UMD's quarterback play has been poor, and to me that more or less seals an opposing offense's fate. I don't see any running back coming to the Alerus and having much success running the ball against this defense.

If the Sioux were to win by just 14 (or less), I'm going to be pretty concerned about the rest of the year. One thing I really like about this team so far is that with the exception of the Delta St. game, none of the home games have really been close. True, Mesa turned out to be far worse than anyone could have predicted, but still the overall home schedule has been pretty decent and the Sioux have taken care of business and haven't needed to mount any comebacks or last-second field goals for wins. If UND can play the way it's capable, I like for all three remaining home games to be Sioux wins by 20-plus points. The talent differential between UND and UMD, MSU and USD should be pretty substantial, and that talent differential should only be magnified by playing at home.

Yes, the alternative is to move to dI before a school is financially ready, which can result in only adding two football scholarships the first year. Not that any school we know has done that. As I see it, there are a couple of different ways ex-NCC schools have gone about things in their move to dI. Like NDSU or not, I give them credit for the fact that they've not gone halfway in terms of football. Sure, they're not having as much success this year as they would have liked, but at least they've added the maximum number of football scholarships they could so that they'll be able to get to 63 as early as the NCAA allows. SDSU and UNC, on the other hand, have taken baby steps in that SDSU is at just 38 scholarships, and I believe UNC is in the 40's, even with a one-year headstart on NDSU. If UND makes the move, I would certainly hope that it will devote the necessary resources to football immediately. I'm pretty confident that will be the case.

Four regional bowl games were played, then a college division "national champion" was declared via a poll. What I find interesting is that when you consider how often a team not considered the favorite wins the dII national title, e.g. Delta St. in 2000, UND in 2001 and GVSU in 2003, such a system would appear to not be particularly accurate. Last year, for example, more than likely North Alabama would have played Valdosta St. in a bowl game, and then would have been declared national champion, and I think we know now that they were not better than UND or GVSU.

RD17 or Jim: I noticed that this week, both USD and Bemidji St. are in the regional top-12 despite the fact that their respective SSI's are apparently in the low 7's. Are there really not more than 10 schools that have respectable SSI's right now in this region, and therefore these two teams are ranked more or less by default? Both have played two games against dIII/NAIA programs which I would think practically mathematically eliminates them from ever accumulating enough power points to have a playoff-worthy SSI.