Game Day: North Dakota @ Simmons Field

■ J. C. Field, Assistant Coach of the Fighting Sioux, is a former Mizzou catcher (05-06) and spent a year in the KTGR broadcast booth alongside Tex Little. J.C. was the catcher for the combined no-hitter pitched by Max Scherzer and Michael Cole on April 1st, 2005.

■ Forecast (KMIZ.com):

Thursday: 61/40 Mostly Sunnt

Friday: 69/45 Partly Cloudy

Saturday: 45/30, 70% Rain

■ UND is finishing up a stretch of 9 games in 8 days.

March 12: A Saturday doubleheader at Southeast Missouri State will begin a stretch where the Fighting Sioux will play nine games in eight days. With school out of session for spring break, UND will take advantage of the time off by playing three games at SEMO, and two at SIU-Edwardsville before closing out the swing with a four-game series at Big XII power Missouri.

■ From Tigerboard.com, re: North Dakota

TigerNation25: SIU-Edwardsville 11, NDU 0. Make that 1-5 for North Dakota...with this 11-0 loss they have now been outscored this year 68-17 in six games.... Oh yeah...and SIU-Edwardsville was 2-12 coming into today's game.

MizzouAstro: So we will win 2-1 every game

■ Redhawks split two games with North Dakota (SEMissourian.com)

Fighting Sioux coach Jeff Dodson was elated with the split after his squad notched its first win of the year against his former club.

Dodson spent five seasons as an assistant under Southeast coach Mark Hogan before taking over North Dakota's brand-new Division I program last year.

"It's always good to get that first win out of the way, and to get a signature win against a program like SEMO," said Dodson, who led the Sioux to a 14-29 record in 2009. "It's awesome to be back here. I've seen a ton of people I had ties with, a lot of friends."

■ On the Incidence of Swept Doubleheaders (The American Statistician, jstor.org)

Given that the proportion of double-headers swept is greater than 1/2, is it significantly greater? For 1964, the proportion swept is .582, and the two-sided 95% confidence limits for this proportion are (.513, .652). . . Thus we may safely accept the hypothesis that more double-headers are swept than are split.

■ 2010 is the second year at Division I for the fighting Sioux. The College Baseball Blog had an interview last April with UND Head Coach Jeff Dodson:

From day one, we had to instill in our kids a mindset that they belong at Division I. Every player on our current roster was recruited to play at the Division II level. It was clear that there was a doubt at the beginning of the season that they could compete with some of the best teams in the country. But that doubt has been erased by beating some very good teams and competing at a high level in games where we fell a little short.”