Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Guest Post from @BurntBoats- In response to his twitter war with the classy North Dakota faithful


It’s been a BUSy week in North Dakota

@BurntBoats (or BurndtBoats for the ND fans that can’t spell) here, and before I get started I would like to thank BSRS for allowing me this guest post, as a tweet string would have been so woefully insufficient for this. Last year, BSRS had one of their best posts of all time during the North Dakota weekend about the absurd reactions UND fans had to tweets about their team, unfortunately (fortunately?) I forgot about this when I sent what I thought was an innocuous tweet in response to:


Parsing other tweets UND’s timeline for the day seems to have roughly been:
3pm: Leave for UNO’s rink
5pm-7:30pm: Play game
7:30pm-4:30am: Press conference, shower, get in bus and leave Omaha for Grand Forks
So at 4:30am the players are still not in their dorms, have been out of their hotel rooms for 15 hours, and have been on a bus (some puking) for roughly 8 hours.


One man’s opinion (and one that apparently all of North Dakota disagrees with) is this doesn’t seem quite fair to the players. Thanks to their hard work, UND has a palace of a stadium with 12,000 leather seats; they are the second most profitable college hockey team in the nation with over $1,500,000 in annual profit. On the annual report they publicize they added an extra line that was not required and no other school reported because the team was just so financially sound:  "Men's hockey had an exceptional year with $3,318,211.00 in ticket sales for FY12." Remember they did not need to make this public, but they chose to anyway to brag about their strong finances.

Questioning whether the players who generated all that money for the school should be given a flight home from Omaha instead of an overnight bus ride where they became ill is not an insult of the team at all, it is wondering if the administration can do better for the players who do so much for them (including generate the money that pays their salaries).

This takes us to the reaction; any comment about UND’s program by an outsider is apparently offensive and must be defended with “logic”:






Additionally many ND fans have claimed that Boston fans just don’t get trips of this distance. We are spoiled in that our farthest league game is 250 miles to Maine, because if we had 500 mile trips like UND to Omaha our players would be bused not flown. However, all of our America East and Patriot League teams had games in the Baltimore area (UMBC and Navy). They fly, despite that trip being 100 miles shorter than the trip UND bused this weekend. Whoops.

Not only were random fans with access to “a google search” (Note she did not use Ask Jeeves) taking exception to my thought that the administration’s decision to bus the players instead of fly didn’t seem to be putting the players best interests first; but my tweet got its own blog post on a website about the team . When he initially saw the tweet from @UNDSID that I responded to, this exact blogger wrote “I just hope we don't have a bunch of sick and banged up hockey players this week” and if you are worried about such a thing I can only assume you would want the school to take measures to ensure the health of the players, but he quickly dismissed this thought and switched to the defensive once he saw my comment.

He said that because UND reported their overall athletics revenue and expenses matched absolutely exactly they needed to bus not fly as they have no extra money. And while that seems like sound logic at first glance, if you actually believe that both revenue and expenses could both end at exactly $17,512,292.00, and that the school did not just adjust whatever operating profit or loss was realized to zero at the end of the year… well I have some Enron stock to sell you. In case you were worried this was a crazy one in a trillion coincidence, Alaska Fairbanks revenue and expenses both ended up at $6,860,786 despite all those flights they took! (BU’s also matched exactly)

If anything this strengthens the case that the players deserve flights (not that they are above buses, like the blogger claims I said, but that the administration should take it upon themselves to take better care of the athletes) since the department will just wipe away any profits or losses at the end of the year.

I wonder what other mundane tweets I can make leading up to the UND weekend to bring out more of these entertaining fans.


14 comments:

  1. Ummm....guys were sick prior to the weekend. Dillon Simpson had to sit out the third period of Sunday's game because he was sick with the flu. No one got sick because they took a bus. If they had flown, the scene would have been the same, vomiting, ice packs, and textbooks, but on a plane instead.

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  2. Total game attendance: UND > bu
    Fans that travel: UND > bu
    National titles: UND > bu

    Not surprising some no-name bu blogger still but hurt his school's program is a joke compared to NoDak's... I like how you turn a twitter conversation with one person into all of UND's fans. Go back to doing what you do best which is being bc's bitch. Oh, by the way, Nodak's hockey history is greater than anything in the east... always has and always will. Continue on with your moronic little blog.

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  3. NoDak has great history and is a powerhouse and yet is afraid to schedule Minnesota for the next 4 years because they know what the Gophers would do to them. M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A

    UND has a bigger rink. i hope you have a bigger attendance total. I would love to see how many fans from North Dakota travel to Boston this month. I also hope they take a bus with the team. Better get going right after the games this weekend

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    1. MN wouldn't schedule ND until some well known alumni got mad and vocal about it. This Blogger is trying to make a name for himself by sorting the pot, Grand Forks is expensive to fly out of, and Omaha is a straight shot down the interstate on I-29. Also these players aren't bratty Masshole divas like BU's players. Looking forward to some world class dives like that twat who faked an injury last year to draw the misconduct and scored moments later on the ensuing power play. I will say, however, BU deserves the utmost respect when it comes to academics for their curve policy.

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    2. Stir not sort. Swipekey's fault.

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    3. Ahhh Swipekey is a bitch man. I feel you. Wouldn't the great North Dakota players deserve a flight over a bus? I will never understand why the North Dakota fans are so defensive over this.

      You seem to still be bitter over Oksanen's beautiful wrister I see. Finnish beauty right there. Ignore the fact that he got elbowed in the head on the so-called "dive".

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  4. Why the complaint about UND being the second most profitable program that rides a bus 450 miles, when the number one profitable hockey program does the same thing?

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  5. Well why do they do it? If there is a reasonable answer for it, I would love to hear it. If it makes sense, then that's all the author @BurntBoats was asking originally. North Dakota fans got very defensive very quickly for no apparent reason besides "all east coast fans are snobs"

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    1. Way to dance around the question, just face it, you wrote what you did to try and single out UND but the fact is other schools have the same method, even the #1 profitable school since money was your reason why to complain! Too bad your complaint is targeted at UND only not every school that does this! Wonder why that is.........hmmmmmm.

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    2. 1. BSRS or any of its bloggers did not write this, it baffles me how many people are confused that this is a guest post on the blog.

      2. I responded to one tweet from UNDSID glorifying the less than ideal treatment of UND hockey players, and since then UND employees/fans/bloggers have not stopped responding to it, that is why it has become as large as it did. If a Minn employee tweeted the same thing and I saw it I would have responded to that tweet in a similar manner. If their employees/fans/bloggers tried to defend the logic behind it as poorly as their UND counterparts did the same thing would have happened. Why do you have such a persecution complex?

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  6. Whioux players barfing on the bench, barfing on the bus ride back to Grand Forks.

    Bad fire water?

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    1. "Fire water" Are you suggesting that Sioux players are native? Is that what your simple, restarted mind thinks? Silly little person...

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    2. Relax Kimosabe.

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