After Brian Faison announced that they were canceling the site visit by the Summit, the writing was on the wall. As we predicted earlier, the Big Sky announcement is coming on Monday. We thought it would be as early as Friday or Monday and it appears the UND administration wanted to get it leaked in time for the weekend football game. It would give all of us something to talk about at the game and afterwards.
Some thoughts:
- Lets looks at the markets in the BSC and their sizes:
Portland, OR – 500,o00+ (Portland State)
Sacramento, CA – 400,000+ (Sacramento State)
Ogden, UT – 75,000+ (Weber State)
Greeley, CO – 75,000+ (Northern Colorado)
Davis, CA – 60,000+ (UC-Davis – FB Only)
Missoula, MT – 55,000+ (Montana)
Grand Forks, ND – 50,000+ (North Dakota)
Flagstaff, AZ – 50,000+ (Northern Arizona)
Pocatello, ID – 50,000+ (Idaho State)
San Luis Obispo – 45,000+ (Cal-Poly – FB Only)
Cedar City, UT – 25,000+ (Southern Utah)
Bozeman, MT – 25,000+ (Montana State)
Vermillion, SD – 10,000+ (South Dakota)
Cheney, WA – 9,000+ (Eastern Washington)
As you can see there are some very big markets and some smaller markets. As far as Eastern Washington goes, it appears to be more or less a distant suburb of Spokane so it isn’t isolated by itself. We would assume a charter could fly directly into Spokane.
- The recruiting implications of this are major. UND has already made inroads to the Sacramento and San Francisco/Oakland markets with the signings of current freshman Breon Butler (Pittsburgh, CA), Joey Walker (San Jose, CA), Chris Comes (Danville, CA), and Ekenna Anya-Gafu (Sacramento, CA). Now they will have the ability to tell recruits that games will be played in Sacramento, Davis, San Luis Obispo, and Portland. Northern California is an extremely under-recruited area of the country. There are a lot of quality players that end up going to Junior Colleges out there because fall through the cracks. We would also expect recruiting in Colorado and Arizona to intensify being they have been in those markets already the last few years. Having said that, UND will still obviously continue to recruit the periphery states of the upper midwest as well. It just makes recruiting out west MUCH easier now.
- To all UND fans: Lets enjoy this time and remember how hard this was to pull off. Give Brian Faison and President Kelley credit for the behind the scenes work they did. We are also extremely excited to see these Big Sky teams come to the Alerus Center as they play very fan-friendly football in that league.
- This also opens the door to alumni and fans out west who are otherwise unable to attend UND events. The alumni-relation ramifications for this could potentially be huge in terms of fundraising for the future. This will be a good way to get everyone who has lost touch with UND re-connected so to speak. I’m sure the UND Foundation office and President’s office won’t mind their trips to the west in the winter months either.
- Because of how many games are already on the 2012 football schedule, we thought it would be tough to incorporate a BSC schedule before 2013. However, there might be some buyout clauses in contracts for all sports that allow for conference obligations and games that we aren’t aware of that would take precedent and minimize the buyout expense. We are now hearing they could start league play as early as 2012 but that remains to be seen. Cal-Poly and UC-Davis are starting in 2012.
- We fully expect USD to announce their decision to join the Big Sky for all sports during this next week. They apparently have some internal issues which need to be figured out that UND did not have to worry about. From what we are told they are simply logistical and that they will be solved shortly.
- We have taken a lot of jabs from other Internet discussion forums recently about our insight, opinions, reports, thoughts and credibility. Some have discredited us as “just some fans who don’t know anything more about the situation than anyone else”. We hope what has transpired has eased some of those concerns. While we don’t have to follow any media or journalistic standards, please know that we will do our best to continue to filter and doublecheck our findings before we share them with you on here in as professional a manner as possible. If we are speculating or guessing on certain topics, we will always make sure to qualify it as such.
- We all should probably start getting familiar with this link and look forward to having the UND brand on there as well. Makes us giddy.
- UPDATE – Just came across this link pretty much backs up what we stated above about the USD situation.
