Merry Christmas

Not that many people tend to visit this site during the holidays, but those of you who do will notice the design changes. I tend to get a little bored with the look of a site after 12-18 months, and mine was certainly getting to be on the stale side. For the most part, the changes are cosmetic as nearly everything that was available before is still available now (the snowflakes are just for the holidays). With the changes, I thought I'd take a moment to highlight a couple of the resources I have linked from here: NCAA D1 Recruiting List (2007) - This is Chris Heisenberg's annual list of commitments. Chris also has a blog where he discusses recent moves. I don't think you can find a better source for this data. Hans' Standings and Attendance - There's always talk about attendance... who's up and who's down. Many people erroneously attempt to compare a mid-season average to the average from the end of the previous season, which doesn't work because the averages are not static through the season. Hans Hornstein has taken the guess work out of it all by comparing current attendance to the attendance after the same number of games from the previous season. This way you can see that Des Moines is up an average of 818 after 11 games compared to last season. Hans also provides graphs comparing the current season trend lines to the previous two seasons, which are excellent for observing how the averages vary through a season (i.e., peaking with the home opener, bottoming out 4-7 games in, then a slow steady rise the rest of the season). On the standings side, Hans provides all the usual amenities, and also provides max (if a team wins out, how many points would they have) and end of season pace values. He also has a shadow line in the standings tables (except in the USHL, where everyone gets to dance) showing who would make the playoffs should the season end today. Hans has other tools as well, so check them out.