[University of North Dakota Hockey 2015-16 season]

OK, so educate me.  How is it stupid to assume that, if the controlling broadcaster waits until two weeks before the season starts, that the subordinate broadcaster would no longer be able to pick up games in the short term, because their schedule is already locked down in large part?  Please explain.

Last season, Fox had very few games until the second half, so my assumption was that they had to wait until the schedule was released, and then it took some time to get games on TV.

UND was a major driver to create the NCHC, so those of us that think the TV deal was rotten for UND are critical of it.  If the deal does not cause less games to be televised nationally than before the deal, I'd sure like to know why games are not on cable.

I'll try to answer this here. CBS often picks out the games long before it's announced to the public. I don't know why the release is sometimes delayed, but I know I had the schedule on my blog before it was released last year. I'm guessing CBS, UND and FCS have known for a while which games are going on CBS this season.

As for Fox College Sports -- the first year of the CBS deal, it did prevent FCS from picking up games because it had an exclusivity clause. However, the CBS exclusivity clause was eliminated last season opening the door for any non-CBS games to appear nationally. FCS wanted to pick up nearly all non-CBS UND games. It needed to get Midco's approval, though, to take its feed.

Midco didn't want this, because it is trying to get into the Fargo market, and fans can get FCS on CableOne in Fargo. Midco wants those fans to have to cancel CableOne and subscribe to Midco to get games. Eventually, Midco compromised and allowed FCS to take five games. They picked second-half games because they figured the stakes would be higher. From what I understand, if FCS could have blacked out Fargo, Midco would have let them have all the other home games, too, but FCS isn't able to do that.

The Midco contract expires after next season and UND has some decisions to make on its TV future and there's one very out-of-the-box option. I will detail that in a column soon. Hope this helps explain the confusing situation.

[MacMillan to have surgery, listed as 'out indefinitely']

There’s also an interesting story in the St. Cloud Times today with some quotes from Jonny Brodzinski, whose slap shot broke the leg of MacMillan.  

 

Per Schlossman, Friday Morning Reading.? ? ?? ??

 

That's what I get for posting after I have been awake for almost 24 straight hours - meant to say HURT the leg of MacMillan. I've heard all the rumors that you guys have about the nature of the injury, but haven't heard confirmation on anything... and I'm fairly sure his leg wasn't broken... oops.

[Future UND/ Bison football Game]

You guys can e-mail me if you have questions about how this stuff works. Since a lot of wrong assumptions are being made, here you go:

I submitted the original open record request for e-mails a month or two ago. I received quite a few pages of e-mails dating back three years. The e-mails showed that the schools were not close to agreeing on a contract. If there were signs that they were close, we would have immediately run a story on it. Instead, we decided to do a broader, in-detail piece (a Sunday enterprise, as we call it) after the spring sports season when we start to lack local copy. We did not feel that any news organization was poking around in that direction. If anybody had done the same request in the last three years, the 2011 e-mails showing how close the schools were to playing would have been reported.

However, on May 13th, the SiouxFootballInsider Twitter account posted something about "interesting info" involving the UND-NDSU football game scheduling. That Twitter account/blog is followed by many other media people, and we knew that tweet would propel them to start digging into info. We did not want to get beat on a story that we had, so that night, we posted a story of the e-mails we had. It was not close to the piece we had envisioned doing in the early summer, but we felt we would get beat if we waited around. At the same time, knowing that TV stations would very likely be sending in their own open-record requests to get the info that we had, we decided to submit a second request to make sure there was nothing new that they would get and we would miss (in other words, anything since our initial request).

About a week later, I received that request from the general counsel of the North Dakota University System (who also sent me the first request). It had two more e-mails in it. I received the request at about noon. Assuming other news outlets were getting the same request, and that there was interesting info in it, I quickly filed a story showing the updates and put it online.

So, that's how it happened. It was not the piece we had hoped to do. Our stories still had holes in them (What happened in 2011? The two had seemingly agreed to two dates and were going out to lunch in Fargo. How did it not get done? We also would have liked to ask Faison what type of pay day would it take for UND to view the NDSU game as its guarantee game for the year). A comprehensive piece would have been much better. But once we figured others were on the trail, we had to change our plans.

No, I do not have Brian Faison's office bugged. No, he did not tell me, "Hey, open record request me, please!" (It would be great for us if he did inform us of his e-mails -- maybe it wouldn't have taken us three years to dig them up -- but unfortunately he does not). No, I did not find the e-mails and tell my editors, "Hey, I have a feeling someone is going to wear an absurd shirt to Springfest, so I think it's best if we publish it on Day 2 of Springfest stories, then throw it on the bottom of Page D1 to try to distract everyone from our 1A stories. What do you say, guys?!" I know, I know, it's hard to believe that it didn't actually play out that way.