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:

Overnight bus ride, players vomiting, ice packs everywhere, text books out. Keep this in mind when you question their commitment. #NDproud
— Jayson Hajdu (@UNDSID) November 11, 2013

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.