MANKATO – The main purpose for a journey to the prairie on Saturday was to chronicle the NCAA Division II football quarterfinal, featuring No. 1-rated Minnesota State Mankato and No. 2 Minnesota Duluth.
This was a reminder that, even as a number of storied programs have left this division to play second-tier Division I in the FCS, there are a good number of outstanding athletes playing at the top level of Division II.
There were passes thrown and catches made and hits delivered among the Mavericks and Bulldogs that would've been as effective at the higher levels of college football.
The trip also gave me a chance to actually attend an MSU Mankato hockey game in its home arena, the Verizon Wireless Center, for the first time.
(Note: It also gave me a chance to stop at Pagliai's Pizza a few blocks away in downtown Mankato, but that's another story).
Two years later, it remains astounding to me that the greedy sons of a gun from the Big Ten were willing to blow up the grand little sports community of college hockey – astounding because of hockey's unimportance in the big picture for the Big Ten and its TV network.
Commissioner Jim Delany and his TV advisers clearly have no conscience. No matter the circumstance, greed always wins, and the in-person customers always lose.
Example A is the poor suckers who still pay premium prices to watch Gophers basketball in Williams Arena. First, they are stuck with a half-dozen December home games against nobodies and with a ticket price value of zero, and then the great tradition of Saturday afternoon conference games in the Barn has been lost.