jdub27

Keep your pants on, just 12 short years until UND takes over the REA.

Threatening to pull the basketball team is interesting. I've heard a long term plan involving that but it requures significant capital that could be better spent elsewhere at the moment. I doubt the logo on the court has anything to do with this.

Guessing UND wanting to renegotiate their contact with the REA didn't go as planned. UND wanted to pay less to help with budget cuts, which Kennedy alluded to a while back. UND has a legitimate argument they should pay less since they are using the facility less and freed up 5-6 weekends a year for the REA to book other events. The REA takes a pretty decent cut of ticket revenue (52% I believe). This breakdown is also the reason the facilities expense was never allocated properly among the different sports. That being said, don't look a gift horse in the mouth and negotiate in good faith. It will be interesting to see what shakes out of this.

The portion of between Washington and getting into the parking lot (going east and west) is owned by the gas station. However the remainder of the parking lot is owned by Hope Church and is an absolute disaster. Some of it was fixed a few years back but you can't tell. Can't imagine some of the tenants are happy with it.

I think it'd be a bit of a surprise if Buchanan left considering his ties to Bijiek, but it does seem like someone either won't be back or won't have a scholarship that previously did.

It's funny that somehow you think the Fighting Sioux nickname/logo made you different and unique from all the other college sports fans out there. Here's a hint, it isn't the nickname or logo that makes a college special, it's the other way around.

I prefer Coach Gru

Did you get lost in moser's time space continuum?

I don't blame SDSU for building an outdoor stadium, very nice facility and they should be proud of it. That also has nothing to do with my thoughts that UND would be making the absolute wrong choice to do the same.

I don't know what donations were in 2003 but I have pretty high confidence they were much lower than $2.45 million, which is where they'd have to be for your point to actually make sense. Nice effort though

There must be some group of people giving more. I can't think of any other explanation how donations haven't absolutely tanked from all the self-proclaimed big time donor/keyboard warriors who said they'd never give another dollar to UND if they dropped the Fighting Sioux nickname. And I'm told that group is the super majority by some random measure I saw on the internet (97% of people or something along those lines....?).

It's a common misconception that there is a significant drop in attendance as the season goes on? Or that they drew 5600 for a playoff game, less than half of what was at their season opener on a Thursday against Duquesne, another game that was an easy win? Or that the regular season finale against UNI drew 5,000 less than the season opener. Yeah, those are "misconceptions"....

Yep, that volunteering and community service definitely is the issue. He needs to be more of a jackass along the lines of JJ Watt.

Look down the road to SDSU and set how their attendance trends as the season goes on to see exactly why UND needs to continue playing indoors.

Could also save money on the cost by reducing seating by 95% of that example and still have plenty of extra room!

Agreed, it was the best option for both options. They have a hell of a track program down there.

This is much more clever and acceptable than Sue.

Has their been anything more predictable in this whole saga than the showdown between allowing this to happen and the backlash if/when they don't allow it?

Close enough, though I've made it clear I thought they eliminated a handful of nicknames I feel would have been better options for reasons I disagreed with. In reality, the criteria was a pipe dream for plenty of reasons. There is no all-encompassing, magic nickname out there that no one has thought of, checks every box and someone isn't going to find something wrong and/or offensive with. Every single individual has a different opinion on what is required to meet those requirements. What one person feels is unique and promotes a sense of strength, another thinks the exact opposite. People have different perspectives, which is why a large committee wasn't going to come up with a handful of choices everyone agrees with or thought fit the criteria. That being said, they had no choice but to use a big committee because people complain so much that their voice wasn't heard or their group wasn't represented. We've already seen those complaints twice since then (logo and now the mascot choice). My overall point is that people keep blaming the committee because UND ended up with the most generic nickname of the bunch. They shoulder a bit of the blame for not eliminating it, however the true blame is on the stakeholders who twice voted it as their top choice. That group was well aware of the criteria as well, yet Fighting Hawks managed to come out on top in both rounds of voting.

Four of the five choice for stakeholders had to choose from wasn't a bird or color. Quit shifting the blame off the group that is the one that actually picked the nickname.

He never claimed UND received less money, he claimed they received a smaller percentage of their revenue from the state, which are two different things. On top of that, a 2015 budget isn't going to show what actually happened over the biennium in terms of actual revenues and breakdown of where they came from.

Interesting comment by Kennedy. Will be interesting to see the responses to this.

Did he rig the voting? People wanted a voice, so they were given input. No one forced the stakeholders to compound and then finalize something that you can claim as a mistake the committee made. They were tasked with coming up with a new nickname and gave people 5 options and the vote of the stakeholders is why we are where we are. This blaming the President or the committee is a complete cop-out. The stakeholders picked Fighting Hawks as their top choice twice.

I don't see how that's still on the stakeholders for voting it the top choice twice and making the actual selection. They had two chances to remedy what the committee missed and didn't do so. They pretty much had to do a top 5 to include Nodaks in the vote after the backlash about removing "no nickname" (which should have never been considered in the first place). However even if they would have just went with the top 3 choices, I can't imagine there still isn't at least a similar type of argument going on today because if we're being honest, for a large contingent of those opposed, whatever was picked wasn't going to matter, they were going to hate it.

Tough to put it all on the committee when students, faculty and staff (including retirees), alumni, donors and season ticket holders were the ones who actually picked it. Complain all you want that the committee (chaired by former hockey player Karl Goehring) failed by leaving it in the finalist group, but the blame lies on those that voted for picking it over Nodaks, North Stars, Roughriders and Sundogs. Looking at how the committee actually ranked the 7 original finalists using the criteria you mentioned, they preferred Roughriders (48 points) followed by Sundogs and North Stars (46 points), Nodaks (42), Fighting Hawks (41), Green Hawks (35) and no nickname (21). The people that voted had two different chances to eliminate Fighting Hawks, when the list was narrowed from 5 to 3 and the final vote. Yet it came out on top both times. Again, the committee may have left it on there but it wasn't them that picked it.