UND92,96

Per a Maurice tweet, there is a new commitment. I'm guessing Hartford?

USD beat the Gophers today. That Craig Smith guy can coach a little bit, huh?

Football Scoop is now reporting that Babers is headed to Syracuse.

Here's an outside-the-box suggestion--Dave Thorson. I imagine formerly working under Clem Haskins is problematic for many, but he's a ND native and has had incredible success at the high school level. He's also sent several players to UND over the years, including current players Crandall and Collins. I believe he could recruit the twin cities area very well. Not sure he'd even be willing to leave the cities after all these years, though.

My fear with a hypothetical Brian Faison-led search for a basketball coach is that he'd simply wait for people to apply unsolicited, and let the now infamous "process" play itself out. While I certainly don't know this to be true, there were some allegations that Faison did not reach out to anybody after Mussman was let go. If true, a similar inaction in the search for a new basketball coach likely wouldn't end up as well as the football search did. Somebody like Walthall probably isn't going to simply apply. He needs to be convinced by the a.d. that this is the right move for him.

Depends on the language in the contract. Lennon was making over double what Jones is, and his buyout, with one year remaining on his contract, was $55,000. I would guess that a hypothetical buyout of Jones' contract would be considerably less than his present yearly salary.

I don't expect Smith to come to UND. We had our chance and Buning blew it. But I do think the next coach gets $150k.

It's a problem for them. Similar to ND's open records law, which discourages many presently employed people from applying for high-profile public jobs such as coaches, a.d.'s or university presidents.

One-year contracts in South Dakota.

Even Tom Miller acknowledged Jones is on the hot seat during the Herald's live chat going on right now.

If we assume that certain coaches have been kept around for purely financial reasons, wouldn't it have been even more cost-effective to simply wait until they were going into the final year of their contracts, and then maybe offer a one-year extension? I guess I've just never understood the rationale behind offering multi-year extensions for coaches no other schools are pursuing?

As I recall, Dale did pretty well against all those "powers" in division II. Last time I checked, UNC and the xDSU's were still around in 2001, and only UNC had left by 2003.

It seems bizarre that Kill was 49-25 as a dII head coach, whereas Lennon was 90-24, and yet somehow Kill had more success and made considerably more money than did Lennon at the division I levels. I don't think many would have predicted that 10-15 years ago.

Faison has probably been fine from a hockey perspective. But he's completely failed the men's basketball program, and played a big role in how far the football program fell by handing out ill-conceived contract extensions based upon very little success. Even though Bubba was a good hire, the process whereby he was hired was about as ugly as it possibly could have been.

RT wasn't the best administrator, but I'd still take him in a heartbeat over Buning or Faison. Personally, I think Wanless was actually the best a.d. UND has had in the recent past.

I think it's both.

Why would he make a good a.d.? Because he's smart, people actually like him, and he would be able to raise serious money. We missed out when we passed on Rob Bollinger. Hopefully the same mistake isn't made again.

Given his age, Faison is clearly a short-timer at UND. I just hope Lennon doesn't rush into anything, assuming he has any interest whatsoever in getting into administration rather than coaching, as he would make an ideal UND a.d. IMO.

Wes Beschorner. Unless plans have changed recently, which is possible.

By administration, are you referring to the president or the a.d.? Because Dale left shortly after Buning was ousted. I think that's why some were pretty frustrated about the timing of his departure. By leaving when he did, it basically guaranteed Mussman was going to be his successor. It ended up being a bad deal for pretty much all involved. With that said, I have nothing but the utmost respect for him as a person and coach.

He was offered the Montana St. job once before. In retrospect, that probably would have been a better fit for him geographically.

The last UND coach I can think of who was let go prior to the end of a season was Shantel Rivard.

Sorry to resurrect this discussion, but I was on vacation last week without decent internet access. This is not regarding any particular player, but my question is--should the mere fact that a player redshirts mean that he should automatically get the fifth year on scholarship? I don't pretend to know the "right" answer, but I do struggle with whether it's entirely fair to give a player who never pans out a fifth year on scholarship, when so many players now don't redshirt, either out of necessity or because they're just too good, and therefore only get four years. To me, the more fair way to do things would be to essentially guarantee four years, so long as certain expectations are met in terms of working hard, staying out of trouble and taking care of business in the classroom. The fifth year would be decided on more of a case-by-case basis, which would be explained up front when the decision as to whether to redshirt or not is made. For all I know, this is done already. EDIT: I don't know what happened with the above post I attempted to quote, but I couldn't seem to get it fixed using the edit function.

He was a year ahead of me at UND, and I played city league basketball with him for awhile in college. He was really a good guy.

I would say that the UND defense matches up a lot better with the Cal Poly offense than the Cal Poly defense matches up with a Studsrud-led UND offense. I also think turnovers will be key. Cal Poly puts it on the ground pretty frequently. If UND is even or positive in turnover margin, I think UND wins.