UND92,96

I'm afraid that whomever is responsible for compiling the official roster has really dropped the ball. Not only are the weights grossly inaccurate in many cases, but they never even bothered to change it when players left, i.e. Aaron Austin. Austin's and Franklin's names were promptly dropped from the basketball roster when they left (temporarily in Austin's case). Why the football roster isn't updated and corrected once in awhile, I have no idea.

I believe you get a maximum of 10 semesters in which to use your four years of eligibility. Bowenkamp has already used a total of 9 (including a red-shirt year AND a medical red-shirt year), so he must sit out spring ball this year in order to maintain his eligibility for next fall.

According to the media guide, the record was 370.

Koupal is a great player, no question about it. I still think Jenny Crouse was the best women's basketball player I've seen in the NCC since not only could she put up big scoring and rebounding numbers--on teams that didn't need her to do everything unlike what USD needed Koupal to do--but she could also control a game defensively with her shot-blocking ability. Defense was an area where I don't believe Koupal particularly stood out.

This article on spring ball was in the Herald today. Erik Ahlstrom has been moved from tight end to the offensive line, which was probably a good move since he's already nearly big enough, and with Mielke, Kusler and Drew Thomas at tight end, there's still very good depth there. It's pretty impressive that Hermes broke Jim Kleinsasser's power clean record.

I'm not necessarily surprised that a fairly experienced team like SDSU would beat a team with many newcomers like Kennesaw in an early season game. It takes awhile for a group of new players to learn to play together, and having a quality coach certainly helps in that regard. But no matter how good a coach might be, you need to have the kind of talent to win a title that is extremely difficult to recruit from the high school ranks by a dII program. Aside from getting transfers, whether juco, division I or otherwise, or perhaps foreign players who are either ineligible for dI or overlooked by dI schools, I see no way to accumulate that kind of talent.

I know that opinions are mixed with regard to whether UND should be concentrating its basketball recruiting more on high school as opposed to junior college players, but I think it's significant that Kennesaw St., the team which won the dII title yesterday, has a roster made up of 10 transfers from either a juco or another 4-year program, with just four high school recruits. Of those four high school recruits, I believe most if not all were deep reserves. I believe last year's champion, Northeastern St. of Oklahama, had a very similar make-up to that of Kennesaw. Kentucky Wesleyan has been doing this for years. It seems clear that regardless of whether people necessarily agree with it or not, juco/transfer recruiting is the way you need to go to win titles in men's dII basketball. Since the high school talent pool around here simply isn't very good, I don't think there's much question that if we as fans want to see a team which has much of a shot at reaching the Elite 8, and perhaps even winning it, junior college recruiting will need to continue, and perhaps even increase. The odds of ever accumulating a group of high school recruits talented enough to compete with the better mostly-transfer teams is not good, needless to say. Particularly considering our geographic disadvantage. It would be interesting to see what would happen to dII basketball if the NCAA enacted similar juco player eligibility requirements for dII as exist for dI. Does anyone know whether there is much of a chance that this will eventually happen?

Even taking the computer rankings completely out of the picture, my opinion is based upon: 1) the NCC was pretty strong last year; 2) SDSU was quite competitive in the league and finished 7-4 overall; 3) I believe that the top five teams from last year's NCC (UND, NDSU, UNO, St. Cloud St. and SDSU) would probably have had a very good chance to beat virtually any unranked I-AA team (and probably some ranked ones), at least on a neutral field, and 4) I believe Northwestern St. was unranked in the final poll, and received no votes. Now, who knows what next year's teams will be like, but based strictly on last year's results, I think a good faith argument can be made that Northwestern St. is no better than an average NCC team. Yikes, I can't believe I just defended SDSU!

What?! You dare to question the computer? Unfortunately, as I said it's nearly impossible to accurately measure how teams from different levels compare.

Actually, I would argue that SDSU belongs in the top five instead of Northwestern St. Again, computer rankings are all we have to go on when comparing teams of different classifications, and SDSU ranks far higher than NW St. (or Southern Utah). If you are comparing the top end teams on the respective schedules of UND and NDSU, I would give the nod to NDSU since UNC, Weber St., Cal-Poly and UC-Davis are all pretty high-quality opponents. For UND, I'd say that UNO, Delta St., St. Cloud St., Ferris St. and Mesa St. would be the top five based upon last year's results, although UMD and Central Washington have also had very good teams in at least one of the past couple of years. I don't think the top end advantage is particularly large for NDSU, but I will give you that one. The problem with NDSU's schedule is, aside from the top four, I don't believe anybody on their schedule would have a particularly good chance of even making the division II playoffs. By contrast, UND has anywhere from five to seven legitimate playoff contenders on its schedule. So in terms of the top half of the schedule, I'd give NDSU an advantage. In terms of the bottom half of the schedule, I'd give UND an advantage. UND also has the advantage in that three of its probable top five games (and five of the top seven) are at home, whereas four of NDSU's probable top five games are on the road.

I don't believe anybody has said that this schedule is as good as it gets, but it's clearly a very solid division II non-conference schedule. Heck, a pretty good argument could be made that it would be a very solid I-AA non-conference schedule if you were simply judging the teams by their caliber as opposed to the label they have affixed to them. Let's face it, for the forseeable future there will still be plenty of talk about UND on your board, and about NDSU on this board. Mostly dealing with the alleged shortcomings of the other. That's no big surprise. I don't believe NDSU's schedule would be as big of a topic of conversation as it is but for the fact that some UND fans have heard the Crookston smack enough times to see this as an opportunity for a little payback.

Obviously, you are certainly entitled to your opinion as to the relative strengths, or at least the name-recognition, of the respective non-conference opponents of UND and NDSU. I'd say that Weber St. was a good get for NDSU, but the rest of the non-conference games range from pretty good (Nicholls St. and NW St.) to horrible (Valpo and Montana Tech). UND's are all pretty solid, at worst. While I'm not a big fan of computer rankings, there's probably not any other way to compare opponents from different classifications. Here are the Massey rankings from the end of last season for anyone who's interested: 107 UND 111 Weber St. 113 NDSU 151 Delta St. 164 Ferris St. 165 Nicholls St. 181 Mesa St. 184 NW St. 225 Central Wash. 325 Valpo 461 Montana Tech People can draw their own conclusions as to which team has the better non-conference schedule on paper. I, for one, wouldn't want to trade schedules with NDSU this year.

And by the same token, all we seemed to hear from certain NDSU fans for the past few years regarding UND's schedule was Crookston, Crookston, Crookston. Never mind the fact that UND still managed to win the NCC and advance to the national championship game in two of the four "Crookston years." It should come as little surprise that some UND fans are going to give a little of that grief in return in response to NDSU scheduling an NAIA opponent and a non-scholarship school.

What is the world coming to when you can't believe a good internet rumor anymore?

Sorry, I seem to have lost the ability to count. Regarding Valpo, the good news is that they were ranked higher than St. Mary's by Dunkel. The bad news is that they were ranked 86th out of 121 I-AA teams, and lost 34-0 to one of the few scholarship programs they played (Murray St.).

Is Valpo a non-scholarship program? I believe they are, but I'm not sure. I imagine the NDSU schedule will be far better next year, but I would have to think that most reasonable Bison fans would have to acknowledge that having a four game home schedule which includes a non-scholarship program and an NAIA school (which plays at the same level as the DAC-10?) is something of a disappointment. The road schedule is fine, but I would think they were at least hoping for some decent dII opponents for home games as opposed to NAIA or Valpo-like opponents.

Thanks for the info. Regarding Koenig, it's interesting that this article from the Green Bay paper from about a week ago certainly gives the impression that they fully expect him back. It would obviously be great to get him. If the staff could somehow land Koenig, Winkelman and a high-scoring juco wing, along with Harkins, this could be an outstanding group of newcomers next year.

I see where Moormann from Dickinson won Mr. BB last night. In kind of a weird statistical quirk, this is the second year in a row where Mr. BB was won by a class A player who failed to lead his team to a state tournament berth (Koenig won last year). In most states, that wouldn't necessarily be too unusual, but in ND, making it to state in class A is not exactly difficult considering there are only 17 schools contending for 8 spots in the tournament. Based upon what I saw, Glasser from Trinity was probably the best high school player in the state, but he appeared a bit cocky which probably didn't endear him to many voters. Overall, it didn't appear to be a particularly strong class of seniors, but that seems to be the case more often than not lately.

While it's fair to be skeptical considering UND finished at .500 overall and in 7th place in the NCC, I see only UNO and Mankato as even arguably returning as much talent as the Sioux. And UNO loses Graham and Dada, and was only marginally better than an injury-depleted UND team this year judging by their two head-to-head matchups. The difference in talent between the top seven teams in the league this year was very marginal, as far as I could see, and between schools leaving the conference and other teams losing key players, UND is sitting pretty well. Ryp is probably the most dominant scorer returning in the NCC. His roughly 25 ppg average over the second half of the conference season was very impressive. Lindahl is a returning all-NCC player. MJ was not all-conference, but his stats were every bit as good as Tola Dada, the supposed mvp of the league this past year. Austin struggled this year, but I still have to think it was mostly due to missing 2 1/2 months. He proved himself as a very good NCC player two years ago, and he was probably one of the top two or three players in the Minnesota juco league last year. Nobles is probably going to be a significant upgrade in terms of talent at the point guard position. Parks clearly can shoot the ball, which was something the team lacked this year. Hopefully Jacobson and Stoute improve because they both have talent. Doyle has a lot of potential. More than likely, one or two other players will be added who will hopefully contribute immediately. While I wouldn't go so far as to say UND WILL win the NCC next year, I don't think there's any question that they have as good of a chance as anybody. Barring a slew of key injuries, I see no excuse for not winning something close to 25 games next year.

I'd say Carr has the basketball skills and the size to be a division II wing player, but his athletic ability, especially his quickness, would be a big question mark in my opinion. I'm sure he'll get the opportunity to play somewhere. Northern State would seem like a decent possibility since they have a history of recruiting North Dakota kids who weren't heavily recruited by NCC schools and having success with them.

Wow, I thought that Guiot was a jerk after his comments following the UND-Bemidji game in Grand Forks, but if he takes half of the current Bemidji team with him to Southwest Baptist, it really confirms that he's a jerk. I guess when your entire team is made up of transfers, loyalty to the program is too much to expect. I doubt very much Glas would be interested in this job. It's been open several times during his UND tenure and he's apparently never shown interest, and he's got the talent returning next year to finally win the league for the first time since the mid-90's.

From the Star-Tribune: Any comments, doclenz?