Saturday, January 19, 2008

Sioux Surging? It Must Be Late January

All you suckers in the Twin Cities who watched Minnesota vs. Minnesota-Duluth tonight in what must have been a 2-1 yawner (two second division WCHA teams? yawn) (oops ... after Saturday's games, UM and UMD are fifth and fourth respectively in the WCHA standings ... but both teams have losing conference records, so the "yawn" comment still stands) could have flipped over to channel 23 (or 13 depending on where you live) and watched the now-ranked-fifth in the Pairwise Rankings Sioux win their fifth in a row last night over Mankato State. (I'm not going to call that school by whatever name they changed it to - same goes for Moorhead State ... as the sound bite goes on the Common Man Progrum: "Be consistent, that's all I ask.")

Friday night's game was also on this channel, but I didn't know that so I ponied up the six bucks to watch it via MSU's webcast. A genuine fight broke out between UND's Rylan Kaip and Trevor Bruess, and Kaip kicked Bruess's ass! Bruess didn't even throw a punch. This was payback for last season, when Bruess tried to square off with Kaip and kept hitting him. Kaip had already had a fighting major that season, and while being hit looked to the Sioux bench to see if the coaches would give him permission to retaliate. They said no, so he just took his shots. Ironically, in Friday's fight it was Bruess who looked like he wasn't given permission to fight. But it just turns out that he's a wussy. Mankato State hockey ... all they can do is aspire to be a little above mediocre.

Grand Forks Herald Sioux hockey beat writer Brad Schlossman has YouTube links on his blog to the recent UND vs. MSU nastiness, including Friday's fight.