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All Things Denver XXIX

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Re: All Things Denver XXIX

du78 said:
I think it is a shame that so muich weight is now given to the OOC games. In the olden days, the OOC games were the chance for a lot of the non-regulars to get their chance to play and experience playing a full game taking a regular shift. It also gave the coaches a chance to rest some of the regulars. Now with the NCAA tourney all predicated on the PWR, potential tourney teams can't afford to slip up in the OOC games when facing non-ranked opponents.
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I agree. It's fun to play team we rarely play and fun to seen players get a chance. Now it's a nail biting affaire with all kinds of ramifications. I remember in the fall of 2005, DU came to Orono to play Maine. While we were getting our asses handed to us for the second game in a row, I mentioned to Andrew Thomas' father Larry that it was no big deal, it was just an exhibition game and we like to win in April, who cares about October etc.etc. Then he told me about PWR. I think it was relatively new then, but man did that come back to bite us in the ***, that plus the Denver Cup. So now we just have to keep rolling and beat these Lake chumps and the fly boys!! Go DU!!!
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

Puck Swami said:
I agree. With DU losing 2 to BC earlier this season, the OOC imperative takes on even more importance this year. DU's is in a winning groove right now, and I wouldn't want to mess with it, I don't think that I would start Murray right now. I'd play Brittain, and if DU can build a 3 goal lead on either of these teams, then I'd bring in Murray. Do goalies who only play two games a week really need rest? On the other hand, if Murray starts and plays well, it could be a big boost for him and the team. Right now, the jury is still out out whether Murray can play effectively at this level.
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According to Bacher in the game blog last Saturday night, he fully expects Murray to get back in there at some point. Chambers is hinting at it in today's Denver Post that Murray may get a start this weekend. I was thinking more of the skaters than the goalies when I was talking about resting players. It was not unsusual for Murray or Marshall to sit some of the top players in the OOC games that may have been nursing some minor dings whereas they would definitely be in the line-up against a WCHA opponent. It was always fun to watch the non-regular guys who busted their butts in practice everyday get rewarded with some ice time in those OOC games. Even with a line-up lacking some of the stars, DU rarely lost an OOC game back in the day. I would also say the talent gap was wider back then between the top teams and some of the lesser teams that got scheduled for OOC games. A lot of the DU OOC games back in the day were against Canadian colleges.
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

I'll never forget that Princeton, Ferris Bueller State Denver Cup debacle. A NCAA tournament killing performance. :mad:
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

Somehow, I managed to switch to GMT and turned off a lot of other things, just got back to normal :o
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

Guess no more wooden sticks in the Stastny basement.
Same goes for 24-year-old Paul Stastny, the last of the Luddites. The Colorado Avalanche centre switched from a Sherwood wooden to a Sherwood one-piece at the start of this season.

“Last season I went through a lot of wood sticks – I think what happened was they were being made at different factories so they were never quite the same although they said they were,” said Stastny. “It was still the same company, but in my mind they were completely different sticks than the ones I was using before. The average person may not notice, but when you’ve used the same stick since bantam and you get something a little different you can tell right away. So that also played a factor in me switching over. That, and technology is always getting better so it’s a case of evolving with the times.”
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http://ndgoon.blogspot.com/2010/11/no-more-wood-sticks-in-nhl.html
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

du78 said:
According to Bacher in the game blog last Saturday night, he fully expects Murray to get back in there at some point. Chambers is hinting at it in today's Denver Post that Murray may get a start this weekend. I was thinking more of the skaters than the goalies when I was talking about resting players. It was not unsusual for Murray or Marshall to sit some of the top players in the OOC games that may have been nursing some minor dings whereas they would definitely be in the line-up against a WCHA opponent. It was always fun to watch the non-regular guys who busted their butts in practice everyday get rewarded with some ice time in those OOC games. Even with a line-up lacking some of the stars, DU rarely lost an OOC game back in the day. I would also say the talent gap was wider back then between the top teams and some of the lesser teams that got scheduled for OOC games. A lot of the DU OOC games back in the day were against Canadian colleges.
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Plus there were the games against the various Olympic teams: Soviets, Czechs, USA etc. Those were all hands on deck.
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

NHL.com has already started their Mock Draft projections. And DU recruit Scott Mayfield makes both lists. Nick Shore's injury seems to have taken him off the radar of the early season projections, but there is a long way to go.

Morreale
http://www.nhl.com/ice/page.htm?id=65971
Scott Mayfield at #29
The MVP of the World Junior 'A' Challenge has smarts and a great wrist shot
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Kimmelman
http://www.nhl.com/ice/page.htm?id=65974
Scott Mayfield at #21
One scout compared MVP of World Junior 'A' Challenge to Larry Robinson
Click to expand...
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

Dmann said:
I agree. It's fun to play team we rarely play and fun to seen players get a chance. Now it's a nail biting affaire with all kinds of ramifications. I remember in the fall of 2005, DU came to Orono to play Maine. While we were getting our asses handed to us for the second game in a row, I mentioned to Andrew Thomas' father Larry that it was no big deal, it was just an exhibition game and we like to win in April, who cares about October etc.etc. Then he told me about PWR. I think it was relatively new then, but man did that come back to bite us in the ***, that plus the Denver Cup. So now we just have to keep rolling and beat these Lake chumps and the fly boys!! Go DU!!!
Click to expand...

It would be nice for nearly all of the WCHA teams if DU could sweep this weekend.

Also, FWIW, the Pairwise came out in 1996-1997.
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

Puck Swami said:
50 years ago this week, DU dropped football....

http://blogs.du.edu/today/news/than...years-since-last-pioneers-football-game#share

It's pretty safe to say that DU hockey was a huge beneficiary of that decision...

My guess is that if DU still had football now, we'd be a lot like Rice, getting kicked around in front of 12,000 people at the 75,000 seat Mile High Stadium....
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In the 80's, I worked with Hugh Campbell, who was then coach of the Oilers. And he told me he thought he caught the last TD pass in history at Hilltop. He was a wide out for a PAC 8 team (Oregon or Washington State?) and the game evidently was one of the last ones of that final season.

One victory against CU (I'm not clear if it's the one referenced in the Clarion article) came against their national championship team lead by future Supreme Court justice "Whizzer" White.

Certainly Rice is generally overmatched, but the Marching Owl Band (MOB) provides some of the cleverest commentary you've ever heard. One year when they were hosting Arkansas for homecoming, the stadium announcer opened by saying: "Ladies, gentlemen and livestock" Still funny.
 
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Re: All Things Denver XXIX

Old Pio said:
In the 80's, I worked with Hugh Campbell, who was then coach of the Oilers. And he told me he thought he caught the last TD pass in history at Hilltop. He was a wide out for a PAC 8 team (Oregon or Washington State?) and the game evidently was one of the last ones of that final season.

One victory against CU (I'm not clear if it's the one referenced in the Clarion article) came against their national championship team lead by future Supreme Court justice "Whizzer" White.

Certainly Rice is generally overmatched, but the Marching Owl Band (MOB) provides some of the cleverest commentary you've ever heard. One year when they were hosting Arkansas for homecoming, the stadium announcer opened by saying: "Ladies, gentlemen and livestock" Still funny.
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How about a Battle of the Bands between Rice and Stanford? Both bands seem to have a point of view and both universities have high academic standards.
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

vizoroo said:
How about a Battle of the Bands between Rice and Stanford? Both bands seem to have a point of view and both universities have high academic standards.
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The guy who headed the MOB during my time in Houston was a protege of the guy at Stanford. Always funny to watch a kid wheel out a base violin in a college marching band. One time they did a version of "Like a Virgin" which featured a blond girl, presumably a virginal Madonna, trying to throw herself into a volcano. But the volcano kept running away! Didn't want any part of her.

When ET was the big film, the Owls played Texas at homecoming, and their half-time was "UT, the Ultra Terrestrial." Finally, one year when A & M came to town the kid in the Sammy the Owl suit had a stuffed border collie (like Reveille) on the end of a leash and dragged the dog all over the stadium, up and down stairs, into the goal posts, into buckets of water. The A & M fans went mad. I mean, they lost their minds. Also still funny.

And these from Wikiedia:

In 1973 the Texas A&M Aggies took exception to a MOB performance which featured such typical MOB irreverence as Nazi-style goosestepping, turning the Aggie War Hymn into "Little Wooden Soldier March", and forming a fire hydrant while playing "Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" in reference to the Aggie mascot Reveille [6]. After the game, the Aggies formed an angry mob outside Rice's own stadium, trapping the Owl band inside for hours until police dispersed some of the crowd and allowed the band to exit, transported by food service trucks. In the years after this now-infamous show, attention has been focused on the shot at Reveille, and that this was an attempt to mock the mascot shortly after her death; in fact it was no more than "poorly-aimed scatalogical humor",[7] the mascot in question having been alive and present at the game.

In 2007, the MOB used their half-time performance to poke fun at the legal woes facing some members of the 2007 Texas Longhorn football team. The band, wearing dark sunglasses, opened with the theme from Dragnet. Three members dressed as Longhorn football players ran around the field being chased by other band members carrying cardboard police cars. The Rice announcer narrated: "In the two years since the MOB last visited Austin, your team's demeanor — and misdemeanor — has changed. Buy a program at today's game. It includes Mack Brown's wrist-slap Top 10 and a photo guide to the next episode of 'America's Most Wanted.'"[8][9]

Unless you've experienced it first hand, you can't appreciate how insufferable Aggie fans are.
 
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Re: All Things Denver XXIX

The Rice-DU football analogy is a good one. But I think if DU had D-I football the attendance would be closer to 4,000 than 12,000.

The point of all this isn't to rip on the DU basketball program, but to point out that how really, really hard it is to build a top-notch hoops program. It takes a LOT of money and I don't agree with Swami that DU has the funding, coaching or wherewithal to pull it off.

Also, lets say DU makes the NCAAs. Teams only make $220,000, half of which is split with the conference, for making the first round. Is DU going to make it and then upset teams like North Carolina, Duke, Kansas or Kentucky?

And then even if they pulled off the upset, perhaps thousands of miles from Denver, are season ticket holders going to flock to Magness the following season to watch DU play Texas-San Antonio, Louisana Tech and Utah State?
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

dggoddard said:
The Rice-DU football analogy is a good one. But I think if DU had D-I football the attendance would be closer to 4,000 than 12,000.

The point of all this isn't to rip on the DU basketball program, but to point out that how really, really hard it is to build a top-notch hoops program. It takes a LOT of money and I don't agree with Swami that DU has the funding, coaching or wherewithal to pull it off.

Also, lets say DU makes the NCAAs. Teams only make $220,000, half of which is split with the conference, for making the first round. Is DU going to make it and then upset teams like North Carolina, Duke, Kansas or Kentucky?

And then even if they pulled off the upset, perhaps thousands of miles from Denver, are season ticket holders going to flock to Magness the following season to watch DU play Texas-San Antonio, Louisana Tech and Utah State?
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Denver as a market, has little college basketball tradition, so to some extent, the local hoops market is still up for grabs. CU and CSU are campus based programs, and it's hard to get Denverites to travel to those schools regularly during the winter. If DU continues to put out out a good product on the floor (basing this on the three years of serious improvement under Joe Scott, rather than the past two weeks' sub-par performance), I think the 4,000 fans per game theshold is attainable, especially if the league opponents are names that people in the west can identify. Coming to DU games is easy and very affordable, and if DU is consistently beating other western schools, fans will show up. Not 10,000 or 15,000 like the top schools draw, but 4,000-7,000 which can be a good college basketball atmosphere. Utah State and New Mexico State have local name recognition are could become local league rivals for DU, and while the other WAC schools may not be as recognizable CU or CSU, they are still better regional attractions than most of the Sun Belt schools were.

The $220,000 NCAA first round payout isn't the big money DU is after (althought the national exposure of an NCAA tourney appearance is worth far more than $200k)-- the real money is in getting on TV more often and making money on guarantee games once you can establish a more compelling schedule.

As I've maintained all along, I don't see DU being a top 20-30 hoops team, since they don't have that level of funding. But there is no reaosn that DU can't be a solid mid-major who can upset better teams from time to time, compete for NCAA berths, and bring 4,000-7,000 fans out to see a winning program playing other western schools. DU does have enough money, good coaching and wherewithal to get to that level.
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

People in Denver are going to turn out for New Mexico State and Utah State?

OK, what are those schools nicknames?

How many people in Denver could answer that question? I'll go with 1/2 of 1%.
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

dggoddard said:
People in Denver are going to turn out for New Mexico State and Utah State?

OK, what are those schools nicknames?

How many people in Denver could answer that question? I'll go with 1/2 of 1%.
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Aggies and Aggies. However, I don't count because I don't live in Denver. :)
 
Re: All Things Denver XXIX

Since Dave29 knew the nickames, we'll bump it up to 2%.

Seriously though, I'd rather play Utah State and New Mexico State than Arkansas State or Middle Tennessee State. USU and NMSU will have alumni bases here in Denver, and the Pioneers played those schools back when they had football 50 years ago, so at least there is some history to build on. And Utah and New Mexico at least border the state of Colorado.

Granted, no WAC schools are going to be Duke, but at least they are somewhat closer, and should be a little more acceptable here than Sun Belt Schools, which were a turn-off for Denver fans.
 
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