Say Anything Blog

Or something like that.  Really you can’t blame me for not understanding.  This wasn’t Tom Dennis’s best effort.

Dennis’s point is that the Alerus is going to be all better once UND’s football teams gets more competitive in Division 1 football.  The basic fallacy with that is that the Alerus has ALWAYS lost money.  The other thing is that there is no guarantee that our team will ever get strong enough to sell out the failed events center. 

Dennis is claiming that since NDSU has been fairly successful with home attendence at their football games now that they’ve gone through the transition. 

Critics say the losses are underreported because they don’t include all monies from various city funds. Let’s assume for a moment that this is the case.

Even then, a look at North Dakota State University’s experience shows that once a Division I program gets fully up and running, there’s a whole lot of money to be made on the attendance side.

“North Dakota State has put together back-to-back 18,000-plus seasons. NDSU attracted a school record 18,141 fans over five home dates in 2007. The football program has enjoyed seven sellouts over the past three seasons including a school record 19,053 against South Dakota State in 2006.”

Tom, The Alerus only holds 13,500 people.  We’ll never get 19,053 in the Alerus.

The big thing is that attendance is still excellent. We’re 2-1 at home   The three games that have been held at the Alerus this year have averaged 9,400 fans.  In 2007 attendance averaged 9,900 people.  There’s no way that an honest person could claim that the woes at the Alerus is a fault of the football team transitioning to division 1.  But then the Alerus Gang is going to find an excuse, any excuse, for their mismanagement every time. 

The other thing is that it’s interesting that Tom has to go back to 2007 for NDSU’s attendance.  The NDSU team was pretty good back then.  This year they suck.  Well they always suck, but they aren’t winning many games this year. 

Fargo is twice as big as Grand Forks and has always been a football town.  Grand Forks is more interested in the fabulous Sioux Hockey Team.  Even so Fargo hasn’t sold out their Fargo dome.  Banking on doing so at the Alerus is silly.

Dennis want’s us to think that we should just shut and be patient.  Sometime in three years or five years or maybe seven the football team will have a good year and THAT will come to the rescue of the Alerus.

It’s been like that all along.  The Alerus gang promises that the Alerus won’t lose a lot of money.  When it does they claimed it was because they didn’t have an hotel.  Nevermind that they were the ones that claimed that hotel operators would be lining up to build alongside the Alerus.  When they massively subsidized an hotel so that it finally got built the Alerus was still losing a like amount of money.

So now they want us to cover our eyes and ignore the mismanagement at the Alerus while our football team grows into division one. 

Let’s go back to the part of his article that I quoted.  He first says that:

Critics say the losses are underreported because they don’t include all monies from various city funds. Let’s assume for a moment that this is the case.

Tom, let’s not assume that’s the case.  That IS the case.  Why can’t you admit that they Alerus Gang keeps most of their losses off of the set of books they report as the Alerus’s loss.  The Britney losses weren’t in the official loss total.  (Although it was a loss).  They count the hospitality tax revenue as coming from operations to make themselves look less pathetic. 

I don’t want you to assume the truth.  I think you should REPORT the truth.

And then from that quote Dennis launches into his offsetting argument that NDSU was able to do something that the Alerus will never be able to do. 

It seems when you try to defend the indefensible that you can make yourself look pretty silly.  UND football isn’t responsible for the mismanagement by the Alerus Gang.  And we certainly can’t let the Alerus Gang continue their misfeasance and hope that football bails them out of their incompetence.