Scriouxed

North Dakota lost their most recent with the NCAA over the status of their nickname last week. This was North Dakota's second and final appeal. At least the NCAA had the good sense to realize the nickname "Braves" isn't derogatory. Good to see they decided to consult a dictionary.

The Double A Zone did a nice job
covering the story. Particularly interesting about that post is the comments section where there are some great comments from college hockey fans pointing out how stupid this decision is in regards to the Sioux.

I feel bad for the blog writer Josh Centor. He seems like a nice guy that is being forced to play the Scott McClellan role here. The one thing he said that stood out the most though was this:

"It took more than four years of research and studies for the Executive Committee to come to its conclusions..."

Wow. It's good to know that the outrageous amounts of money people pay to attend NCAA tournament games isn't getting flushed down the toilet. Well, at least not literally.

Four years of research and all you came up with was Fighting Sioux: bad, Fighting Irish: good? Meanwhile you're letting major leagues bully players out of ever attending college and letting NHL teams bully players into leaving college early. (Incidentally, there's now rumors that the OHL will be restructuring their draft rules so players have even less leverage than they do now. And people say the mafia is dead.) Of course, it's not like the NCAA would have time to step in and help college hockey fight back because their too busy conducting a witch-hunt on certain school's mascots. Oh, excuse me, I believe "witch" is a hostile and absuive term. I meant to say female magician hunt.

The whole thing is incredibly disappointing. There's no reason for the NCAA to be wasting their time with issues outside of their jurisdiction when there are so many issues that they could be working to solve that are within their control.