A few things the NDSU athletic department doesn’t worry about
Many Bison fanatics wish their favorite NDSU teams would compete regularly with the schools’ neighbors in the Big 10 and Big 12 conferences. Hey, sometimes its nice to be the little guy.
No doubt NDSU has more stress with NCAA rules and scheduling than it did as a Division II school, but the hassles are far from what big-time Division I schools deal with.
Here are three things that NDSU doesn’t — given its competition level — have to worry about.
No one’s going pro
At the end of each season, teams at NDSU have to worry about losing players to one thing: graduation.
In major sports at big programs, coaches hope their star players will shun big bucks from the professional leagues and stay in college.
Two years ago, NDSU baseball player Neil Wagner skipped his senior season after being selected in the MLB draft.
While there may be another baseball player who leaves early, the chances of a player in a major sport (football, men’s basketball ) bouncing before he graduates is not likely.
Former NDSU men’s basketball coach Tim Miles has already experienced this at Colorado State. Less than two weeks after he was named coach at CSU, the Rams’ star player, Jason Smith, announced that he declared himself eligible for the NBA draft.
The NBA and NFL has been a detriment to success at Minnesota in the recent past. On the football field two years ago, star running back Laurence Maroney left for the NFL. A few years before that, the Gopher basketball team lost Kris Humphries and Rick Rickert to the NBA.
No Clem Haskins episodes
With the amount of money that top Division I athletic teams produce, there is an immense amount of pressure on the athletes to stay eligible.
As Clem Haskins showed us in the late 1990s, no matter how successful your teams can be on the playing field, it will all catch up to you if it isn’t legit.
After an impressive run, including a trip to the Final Four in the 1997, the Minnesota men’s basketball coach was blamed for several academic violations his team committed.
For his poor judgment, in which he reportedly had a University faculty member write many academic papers for the players, he was forced out and the team’s records have been erased.
NDSU has and will continue to have student-athletes who are academically ineligible to compete, but without the immense pressure, slip-ups like Haskins’ are not likely in Fargo.
Job security
At a big-time school, if a coach struggles for two seasons, he is fired, no matter what his contract looks like (see: Ray Giacoletti).
At a mid-major school, it is unlikely a coach will get axed. Worst-case scenario: their contract will not be extended (see: Derek Thomas).
Giacoletti, a former NDSU men’s basketball coach was hired at Utah three years ago.
In his first season, the team made it to the Sweet 16. After two losing seasons, Giacoletti was unemployed.
Thomas is head coach of the Western Illinois men’s basketball team.
Thomas led WIU, a Mid-Continent Conference member, to a 7-23 record this season, but the school says he will be back next season, the last of his five-year contract.
With little pressure from boosters and fans, NDSU has little fuel to stir-up tension by firing a head coach.
Despite NDSU fans’ desire for the school to compete with the big boys, the lack of headaches isn’t always a bad thing.