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Nobody's Listening AnywayAuthor: John Gaskins
John Gaskins and Matt Zimmer banter about the sports topics people in the Sioux Empire care about --- and some they'll make you care about. Language: en Genres: Sports Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Zim on Jacks' 67-game Summit streak ending, SDSU football surviving portal, declining regional hoops crowds
Tuesday, 20 January, 2026
HEY! We encourage you to listen to this show as part of the "Happy Hour with John Gaskins" daily podcast, which you can find at SiouxFallsLive.com, and most podcast platforms like the one you find here! So, if you enjoy the topics Matt & John cover, you'll get those topics, plus relevant local guests, every Monday through Thursday on Happy Hour... so we highly recommend you check that out!What could possibly be a bigger local sports story than South Dakota State All-America offensive lineman Quentin Christensen turning down a $1 million NIL offer from an SEC school recently? Not much, but the SDSU women's basketball team losing a Summit League regular season basketball game for the first time in 68 contests — which spans nearly four calendar years — was quite a whopper over the weekend. Those were two of the main topics in a 75-minute weekly "Nobody's Listening Anyway" podcast on Happy Hour with Matt Zimmer on Monday. Zimmer confirmed with confidence in his sources that Christensen joins fellow South Dakota native Chase Mason as Jackrabbits who turned down seven-figure NIL offers. This comes three days after the two week portal window closed for players to declare their free agency. SDSU head coach Dan Jackson will join Happy Hour on Wednesday to remark on that, plus the Jacks' top portal additions (many from Div. II) and, as importantly, lack of portal losses this season. Meanwhile, North Dakota State finally became the first team to beat the Jackrabbit women since USD took down SDSU twice in 2022 — in a Feb. 5 regular season game and again in the Summit League tournament championship game on March 8. This means the Bison ended a 54-game overall streak for the Jacks against conference opponents. So why was Saturday the day? How did NDSU pull this off on the Jacks' home court? And what does this mean for SDSU and the rest of the league for the rest of the season, now that (at least for a game) the walls have cracked? Zim has answers and also explains why he feels the SDSU men will still be a threat in Sioux Falls in March despite a 10-10 record and 3-2 league mark that includes last Wednesday's loss to first place and still undefeated-in-conference NDSU. Part of the chat about the two Bison basketball wins was the large and palpable crowds in both Brookings and Fargo for the showdowns with the Jacks. This led to a larger discussion about declining attendance the last several years at local and regional college basketball games in general. Well, except at SDSU (for the most part). Zim and the host pick apart why not as many people go to games despite plenty of the Div. I and Div. II teams in the Dakotas being consistently decent-to-great. The pod's plane lands in Minneapolis with a word about the Minnesota Vikings and how they didn't fit into the playoff picture in a year when things were far more ripe-for-the-taking than most.
