Still Got Hope?

Field of Fragments

2026-01-10T16:52:00.002-06:00

Aging is a wonderful gift. Yeah, the knees start to hurt, the memory imperceptibly but irrevocably fades, your doctor starts making you get colonoscopies (if you’re over 40, ask your doctor whether you should get one – they give you Cheez Its afterward at MNGI!), and realizing you may have less years to live than you’ve been alive is quite the trip; but, man, the wisdom and perspective you gain really slap.

Individual things and events become less urgently chaotic with dichotomous outcomes and more open to nuanced appreciation. There’s a pause between input and emotional response that wasn’t there before (I’m certain that’s due to geriatric synapses rather than any mastery of mindfulness, but give me this cope). And the world starts to narrow just enough that it’s a bit easier to see what matters most and where you should spend your next minute of life.

The wildest thing, though, is the massive collection of lived experiences we accumulate through the years. On the sheer basis of continuing to stay awake and marginally aware, moments of unbridled joy, bottomless despair, laughter with friends, career successes and failures, love, apathy, ennui, hate, and reconciliation all get turned into a delicious, if sometimes bittersweet, broth in the Instant Pot of our lives.

The broth changes as we add new ingredients, all of which are flavored by the ingredients that were there before it. Like good sherry, Madeira, or balsamic vinegar our new experiences are educated by and integrated into the existing matrix, changing it; but in most cases subtly and without a great deal of drama. Each moment, we change and our relationship with the world changes. We usually pay it no heed.

That steaming vat of memories and feelings is the stock for our narrative: the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. My narrative is very different at 49 than it was at nine, 19, 29, or 39. I’ve been lucky enough to have had a ton of therapy and got to see how old ingredients continue to flavor the current broth; but even with that, I couldn’t tell you with any specificity why I am the way that I am, why one flavor transcends the others. There’s an emergent quality to our narratives that defies explanation.

The real crazy shit, though, is when my Broth of Mysterious Qualities is mixed with the broth of 7.5 billion other people and we’ve got a goddamned society. My lived experiences and the stories I believe about it are now combined with your and everyone else’s in the best/worst fireman’s booya in the universe.

And then we form group narratives based on our individual and collective experiences. And then maybe I don’t like your ingredient: fuck you garlic gives me hives get it the fuck out of my soup. And then perhaps someone convinces a bunch of us that garlic has always been bad and that anyone with any garlic in their broth is a vector for hives and shouldn’t be associated with. And then shit gets real. And it gets real in emergent ways we can’t explain.

Once you accept that narratives are emergent you start to notice how fragile they actually are. Not fragile in the sense that they shatter easily, but fragile in the sense that they depend on continuity. On the assumption that tomorrow will rhyme with yesterday closely enough that the story still makes sense.

Most of the time, that works just fine. The broth simmers. The flavors integrate. You go to work, you go to dinner, you argue about dumb shit on the internet, you watch the same teams you’ve always watched. The story updates quietly in the background.

And then sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes something gets dropped into the pot that doesn’t dissolve. It doesn’t blend. It doesn’t politely educate the existing flavors. It just sits there, stubborn, insoluble, daring the whole thing to explain itself. And when the narrative can’t absorb it, can’t assimilate it into our individual and group identities, you get this strange sensation that something has happened without meaning, which is deeply unsettling for a species that runs almost entirely on story. That’s when you start to feel the disconnect.

I think about this a lot in the context of Minnesota Golden Gophers football, which might seem like an odd place to look for insight into societal narrative collapse, but, hey, it’s a Gopher blog. College football has always been a story machine. It takes geography, identity, memory, ritual, and time and turns them into something that feels coherent enough to invest in. You don’t just watch games; you inherit them. You learn how to feel about certain outcomes long before you understand why.

When I was younger, Gopher football had a very clear narrative function. It taught you patience. It taught you guarded hope. It taught you how to recognize effort even when results lagged. Losses fit into the story. Wins felt earned, sometimes disproportionately so. You could explain what happened, even when what happened wasn’t good.

And, crucially, the narrative updated slowly. Coaches changed. Schemes evolved. But the underlying grammar of the thing, the reasons we showed up, the way fandom worked, the way commitment was expressed, the way meaning accumulated felt stable. You could literally miss a season, come back and still recognize the story you were stepping into.

Over the last decade, that’s changed. Someone tossed some garlic in there and some of us got hives. Not all at once. Still subtle. But it fundamentally changed the nature of the soup.

Everything still looks identical on the surface. The field is the same. The band still plays. The same old chants echo through the same old beautiful stadia. Fans still show up in the cold, still complain about the weather like it’s a moral failing and talk about lingering pain from games that happened 20 years ago. We still wear jerseys that haven’t been relevant since Clinton was in office (but absolutely not from local heroes who chased the bag). But the narrative engine underneath it all has been quietly retooled.

The incentives changed. The timelines compressed. The language shifted from continuity to optimization. From memory to metrics. From patience to leverage. None of that is inherently evil. Systems evolve. Broths get new ingredients. The problem is that the old story doesn’t quite know how to absorb the new ones. Indiana, for fuck’s sake?

So, you get these experiences where something happens that feels both real and totally illegible within the context of your identity. It doesn’t fit the grammar you’ve learned. It doesn’t come with an explanation that satisfies the accumulated wisdom in your broth. And then you become unmoored. Lost in the sense that you no longer have the words, wisdom, or temperament to navigate the new reality. You don’t know who put the garlic in there, but they sure as hell did. The broth is fucked and you hate them for it. And they hate you for not liking garlic. Every soup has garlic.

And then you go to work.

You make dinner. You check the score. You argue about whether the offensive coordinator should be fired. You hammer away on Discord with your friends. You show up next Saturday. The ritual continues, because ritual is what we do when narrative fails. It’s how we keep time when meaning gets wobbly.

That’s the experience that feels new to me. We’ve added a whole bunch of new ingredients to the broth, but collectively pretend it’s the same it’s always been. “I don’t taste any garlic!” you tell your friends as you surreptitiously scratch your hives. To be extremely trite, it feels like things changed slowly and then all at once.

It’s like watching a game where the teams do their usual bit, but the crowd isn’t quite sure what they’re reacting to anymore. There’s a half-beat of hesitation before anyone commits emotionally, like the audience is waiting for confirmation that what they just saw still means what it used to mean. We all sort of tacitly acknowledge the rules have changed, that there’s something really fucking different, but no one can explain it, the referees are nowhere to be found, and the NCAA is on a meth bender.

And we still show up. People still bring their kids. Still explain traditions. Still tell stories about games that happened before those kids were born, because that’s how narrative continuity works: you lend someone else your memory so they have something to build on.

What’s different now is that those stories increasingly feel like artifacts rather than foundations. Like heirlooms from a version of the world that assumed coherence was durable.

And this isn’t just a football thing. It’s a city thing. A state thing. A country thing. We all share this massive, interlinked broth of lived experience now, and every once in a while something drops in that doesn’t just change the flavor, it challenges the idea that the broth can be described or whether it’s even broth at all. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that we don’t know how to tell the story anymore without lying.

So we default to routine. We keep showing up. We keep doing the things that once meant what we needed them to mean, hoping that repetition itself will reassert coherence. That if we just clap at the right moments, chant the right chants, wear the right colors, the narrative will snap back into focus. And sometimes it almost does.

You’ll feel it briefly, usually in the quiet moments. A shared glance in the stands. A pause after a big play where the crowd collectively inhales. For a second, the story feels whole again. And then it slips like a dream you can’t quite hold onto when you wake up.

The grief here isn’t loud. It’s not performative. It’s the grief of realizing that the story you relied on to make sense of things no longer updates the way it used to and no one has really agreed on a replacement.

We live in this strange in-between state. The plays still run. The seasons still turn. The rituals persist. But underneath it all, there’s an unspoken awareness that we’re participating in something with a meaning that is no longer relevant or useful. That it does more harm than good. That it will not persist for the rest of our lives and we’ll be tasked with making a new collective narrative. We don’t have a recipe, we don’t know where to find the ingredients, and we’re not even sure how to make the damn broth. But we may have to do it anyway.

Maybe this is what it feels like to live inside an emergent narrative at scale. To recognize that coherence is no longer guaranteed, that continuity has to be actively tended, that showing up doesn’t automatically resolve anything but still matters anyway.

We don’t stop going to games because the story broke. We don’t stop going to work, making dinner, or caring about our neighbors. We keep doing those things because they’re the connective tissue that holds the broth together long enough for new meaning to form.

And maybe that’s the work now. Not pretending the garlic isn’t there. Not insisting the soup tastes the same just because the bowl looks familiar. Aging gives you the curse and the gift of seeing the illusion that “normal” was never stable, just sufficiently coherent for long enough that we stopped noticing how much effort it took to maintain. Once you see that, you can’t unsee it. You don’t get to go back to easy stories, easy optimism, or borrowed certainty. You have to decide, consciously and repeatedly, whether you’re still willing to show up without the comfort of believing the narrative will take care of you in return.

That’s hard. Harder than outrage. Harder than disengagement. But there’s something quietly hopeful in it too. Because showing up after the illusion breaks isn’t habit: it’s a choice. It’s choosing to tend the connective tissue anyway. To lend your memory to someone younger. To clap even when you’re not sure what it means yet. To keep making dinner, going to work, and caring about your neighbors not because it all makes sense, but because meaning has always been something we cook together, slowly, imperfectly, with whatever ingredients we have on hand. The broth is different now – very much worse in some ways. But it’s still warm. And as long as we’re willing to stand over the pot together with our eyes open and no lies to each other, there’s still a chance it becomes something worth passing on.

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

2025-11-22T15:46:00.002-06:00

It is generally not good to write while angry, and inadvisable to allow a game played by 18-year-olds to affect your happiness.

Nevertheless, on one of the last beautiful days of Fall we spent our afternoon watching what has to be one of the worst coached games of the PJ Fleck tenure reach a familiar end.

I’m too frustrated to check the official box score right now so I’m going off memory. Please forgive any errors. But I think Minnesota gained 8 yards in the 1^st Quarter. In the 2^nd Quarter we got tempo working so naturally we abandoned it in the 3^rd. There, in a short 4^th down on Northwestern’s side of the field we clearly needed to either go for it or punt, no third option. So we picked the third option with our kicker who lacks both distance and accuracy, and the field goal kick careened away from the uprights like a wounded, drunk duck. In the 4^th Quarter we allowed desperately-needed clock to burn, then lit our timeouts on fire, called a play that required Jalen Smith to run an east-west marathon to get out of bounds (and failed), then managed only 2 plays in the 38 seconds we had.

A second missed field goal prevented overtime, which was probably for the best. The world did not need more of this.

All the while, our defensive schemes turned Northwestern’s quarterback into a Heisman candidate. 15/15 for over 150 yards with his pick of receivers so open you’d think they were a Waffle House. The Northwestern offense didn’t require a plan or trickeration to dismantle our system; survive the blitz, and someone will be ludicrously open, every time.

We finally got them to 2^nd and 21 at midfield as time wound down. An offsides, a wide open tight end, and a QB run later, Northwestern scored their winning points.

The closeness of the game was thanks to individual players. Drake Lindsey, Javon Tracy, Lemeke Brockington, and Darius Taylor on offense. Koi Perich and Alan Soukop on special teams. Maverick Baranowski made some tackles. I hope Deven Eastern is ok.

What’s more to be written about PJ Fleck at this point? I hesitated to try but had to get it out of my brain. Because, in spite of it all, I still don’t want him to leave. Especially in a season of unprecedented coaching mobility, where I hold precisely zero hope that any replacement we’d find would be as good or better.

Yet I cannot ignore that more or less the same issues that have prevented Minnesota and Fleck from transcending the Big Ten’s middle are still here. This year they are magnified by a young roster lacking a Mo Ibrahim to paper over the blemishes. Fleck’s clock management remains atrocious, and absolutely contributed to the loss in multiple ways. His assistant hiring, always spotty, has conglomerated this season across several facets of the team. Special teams remains marginal, kicking worse. Greg Harbaugh’s occasional success is overshadowed by bizarre play calls and turning away from things that are working. The defense under Danny Collins is an accelerating embarrassment, careening downhill at a Prefontaine Pace. In an empty Wrigley Field, there is still a Northwestern tight end running a delayed 10 yard route to the right, unnoticed and uncovered.

I reject the idea that Fleck can’t or won’t “change his best” because we’ve seen him do it. He’s fired bad assistants. He was willing to change his offense for Max. He takes the occasional risk in short-yardage situations. He’s mostly survived the transition to the NIL era, better than many others (hi Dabo).

Change in this sport we love is intensifying and I think today’s game shows that it is not lack of adjustment, but rate of adjustment that is failing to keep pace. Whether by oversight, real limits, or design (I will not speculate which), Minnesota is losing the arms race for assistant coaches. The conservativism still emerges at the worst possible times. The clock and game management is as bad as ever.

Today was a microcosm of these issues. Results would have been different if we’d adjusted even one of them. The vibes surrounding the program are beginning to stagnate and ossify, especially among casual fans. Bold moves are needed, the kind that if made, might translate to bigger raises for Fleck himself, or serious looks from other programs rather than rumors fed by his agent to pressure Mark Coyle.

I haven’t been truly worried about Fleck leaving Minnesota for some time. First it was because there weren’t many jobs where his culture and brand were fits, then because I felt he’d elevated the program sufficiently to attract other good candidates if he did go, and now because these weaknesses are obvious to everyone. There are an unprecedented number of openings this year; which ones is he a serious candidate for? There are rumors, social media memes, and message board geniuses but let’s be honest: James Franklin to Virginia Tech and Lane Kiffin to LSU this is not.

I would like to find out what bold moves to change his assistants and his program would do, and I would like to find out here, at Minnesota. I still think he’s one of the better options and can still reinvent himself again to succeed. Unfortunately games like today have started to feel like normal, and its starting to suck the fun out of this for me.

Peej, can we try something different please?

Anyway, see you all next week.

Our North Star

2025-08-27T09:31:00.005-05:00

Photo Credit: Patrick O'Leary, Regents of the University of Minnesota 2005

September 2, 2000 was a sunny Saturday at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis. Just after 10:30 AM that morning, I and 270 of my new best friends run-cadenced out of the Metrodome tunnel for the pregame show. It was my first time on the turf where my Minnesota Twins idols had played, and my first Gopher football game.

2000 was supposed to be the year Minnesota took the “next step” after going 8-4 the previous season, Minnesota’s most successful since 1967 and first bowl game since 1986. Talk of the Rose Bowl was in the air and even the pockets of Twin Cities media was starting to shrug off their cynicism and believe that maybe Glen Mason was going to finally do it.

That day in early September, the Gophers walked over the University of Louisiana-Monroe 47-10 and looked forward to another tune-up against Ohio (no, not that one, the green one) the next week. Instead of a walk-over, the Gophers sleepwalked to a 17-23 loss that set the tone for a season of extreme swings from hope to devastation. It firmly ended with devastation as Minnesota gave up a 24-point first half lead to NC State in a drenched MicronPC.com Bowl.

My live, rain-soaked, reaction to Minnesota's performance in the MicronPC.com Bowl, December 28, 2000.

That season turned out to be an apt metaphor for the decades to come. I loved it immediately.

Thursday at 1:00 PM I will walk into Lot C37 on the University of Minnesota campus and my 25^th season of Golden Gopher football fandom will begin. I picked this university out of a combination of pride and spite. The pride was in my state, the Northrop Mall, and the marching band. The spite was all the people I went to high school with who were herding to Wisconsin, chasing the newest, latest thing. I thought that was taking the easy way out. I wanted to be part of building something, not jumping on the bandwagon because Ron Dayne was on SportsCenter.

25 years later there’s been a lot of joy and a lot of pain. The pain has often been stronger. But it was never strong enough to drive me away; likewise the joy on the field wouldn’t have been enough to keep me. Much of what is good in my life is thanks to the University of Minnesota. I met all my best friends here; without it I wouldn’t have met my wife, had our son, or the rest of the life I currently enjoy. I found who I really was, for good and bad, at this place. The community has brought me through the hardest times of my life, and been there cheering with me for the greatest.

My son watching pregame at his first game, September 30, 2023

I’ve reached that point in my life where time sometimes takes more than gives. My best friend from 2001 Spat Camp died last year, her bright light dowsed decades too soon by cancer. Other friends are facing challenges of their own. I lost my dad. I turned grey and got fat. The world got…well, look around you. It’s easy to lose your North Star.

My best friend Jeanne, in happier times at the Sun Bowl, December 31, 2003.

Time also gives you perspective to see that while the product and result on the field matters, what a bunch of 18-24 year-olds trying their best on 12-15 weekends in the Fall shouldn’t dictate your wellbeing. Tomorrow I will celebrate. I will see friends I haven’t seen since December, but it will be like we saw each other yesterday. Campus has changed a lot but the memories are there, nurtured like the saplings planted by freshman year that are now strong trunks. My North Star is embracing the change without forgetting the past.

We’ll drink beers, eat hot dogs, and joke about the bad times…about Tracy Claeys and Tim Brewster, close losses and bad calls. But our hearts will be full again with hope, the sadness and challenges of the world outside campus will fade for a few hours, and we’ll feel like kids again, just for a few hours. We’ll sing the Rouser, criticize the coaches, yell for Koi Perich, do The Gopher, cheer for the dance team, and then we’ll go home to dream about coming back next week.

Life, and our University, moves on.

But the hope abides. It lives through us, and it lives because of us. And through these things we will pass it on.

Football is back. We’re back. I can’t wait to see you all. Row the Boat, Ski U Mah, Go Gophers.

F.A.M.I.L.Y.

2024-12-06T00:16:00.007-06:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z5fH_DQmFY

Sportsball.

Whether from right or left, RETVRN Twitter or Bluesky elders, it implies lack of seriousness and commitment for those of us who choose not to spend our lives in the studied contemplation of productivity or accelerationist revolution.

There is little point to debating the merits of fanhood. I think most of us who would post on Bluesky or read about it here are aware of the realities of dedicating such time and deriving such enjoyment from watching other people (generally much younger) compete on the field, court, or ice. We are aware of the downstream effects and can reflect on our own contributions good and bad.

Existing within this ambiguous state is called being human. Few things are clear-cut, good and bad can be found just a few layers deep. Taken to the extreme, any hobby or distraction could be classified as an immoral waste of resources depending on the perspective of the objective observer. It is worth exploring these questions and doing the moral calculus individually. But in a broader sense, who is to decide what past-times are beneficial and which are not? The strict alternative might be to seek joy only in toil and work, but few are capable of doing so. Somehow we all seek the spirit of a life well-lived.

I’ve been reflecting deeply on this for weeks, because I lost a great friend. I will not attempt to eulogize her here; I have neither the competence to do so or right to presume I could ever represent her whole self. Rather, I want to reflect on a hard fact: without sports, she would never have enriched and brought light into my life. Without University of Minnesota football, the University of Minnesota Marching Band would not exist, and barring a miracle our paths would never have crossed.

The loss of our friend has brought a group of people together. Some have remained close over two decades, but many of us have gone 5, 10, or 20 years without sharing time in a meaningful way. We all say it shouldn’t take a loss to do it, but for some that is exactly what it took for the mundane priorities of day to day life to go by the wayside. That’s also a hard reality of adulthood because we all have responsibilities and priorities; it can the opening of a void in our lives to remind us of what really matters.

We have lamented the missed opportunities, events missed for conflicts long forgotten, texts and voicemails left unanswered, letters unwritten. Yet, in being together we rediscovered the joy we found together in our late teens and early 20s at Bierman, the Metrodome, and house parties in Dinkytown. A gap of decades closed in an instant with the fulfilment of human connection. We cannot get the missed opportunities back, but the memories and opportunities ahead give new life.

The thing is, it’s never too late. NEVER. As we get older, it becomes harder to maintain friendships; that’s reality, and it takes more effort, but boy howdy is it ever worth-it. This year in Section 133 of Huntington Bank Stadium, magic happened. We merged several sections of people whose “primary” groups had shrunk, and whatever disappointment a 7-5 record for Gopher football might have brought for some (not me, but that’s for another time), it was FAR outweighed by new and strengthened, a restored sense of community, and hope for the future. I wouldn’t know any of these people without Gopher sports. I wouldn’t know my wife; we wouldn’t have our son.

Friends, do not defer joy. Our world asks you to do so every day; it asks you to set aside your family and friends for work or worry, it makes implied and direct judgments about how and where you choose to spend your emotional energy. It asks you to spend your hard-won energy in bad-faith arguments with energy vampires instead of blocking them and spending it on people who care about you. It makes value judgements about where you find the small shreds of happiness that bring the light into your life, and complains that you and your friends post about sportsball.

My 25^th year as a Gopher is coming to a close. I’ve never played a second of college athletics…hell I barely played an hour in high school. Doesn’t matter. Here’s the fact: without it, there’s so much I would have missed. I am a more complete human, a better and more productive member of society, because of the experiences I had and the people I met wearing a maroon and gold band uniform in the Metrodome. I want my friends who read this to know how much I love them and value them. Please do the same at every opportunity. Like Indiana at Purdue, finish the drill. Leave no doubt.

E-mail, text, or call that friend you lost touch with. Doesn’t matter if it’s been decades, doesn’t matter if you think it was your fault. Do it today, and don’t stress about the framing or the context. I’m, at best, halfway through my life’s journey…I do not want to wonder what I missed and I’ve never understood that more viscerally than I do today. Make the time for your family, your friends, yourself (but I repeat myself). Maybe you’ll be as lucky I have been and find out that they’re all the same thing.

I know this is hard, but I’ve got some experience now. So, if you need help on your approach, reach out to me on Bluesky…honestly, I want to help.

Earnestly, and from the bottom of my heart: Forget About Me, I Love You.

Row the Boat, Ski U Mah, Go Gophers

The Friends We Made Along the Way

2024-10-16T11:34:00.000-05:00

As one of the 6.5 people who read this blog, I suspect you also had elaborate plans to see the Gophers in the Rose Bowl.

There aren’t a lot of things you have the benefit of planning for decades – retirement and maybe one’s death if you’re particularly frisky in your morbidity – but Goldy and the crew were extremely generous in giving us time to nail down every last detail. A Minnesota child born on January 1^st, 1962, the last time the Gophers played in Pasadena, was ejected out of the womb outfitted in a maroon and gold onesie and promised a lifetime of college football glory. Second Rose Bowl in a row, national championship winners the year before, the smug satisfaction that comes from cheering for a perpetual winner was this their manifest destiny.

That child has been an AARP member for twelve years, just qualified for social security, and is using the money they never had to spend on a Pasadena trip to buy a winter condo on the Alabama coast. What a ride that must have been: from expecting a national championship in childhood and adolescence, to early adulthood in the penury that was Gopher football in the 80s and 90s, almost reaching the mountaintop but falling to their metaphorical death at 41 in 2003, convincing themselves Brew and Kill were the answers in their 50s, to hitting 60 and having college football pull the rug and make getting to the Rose Bowl a near impossibility. Truly a life arc sponsored by Lexapro, ketamine, and Headspace.

I wonder how their Pasadena plans changed over their life. For me, the team was such cheeks when I was growing up that the idea we’d have any shot at the Rose Bowl really didn’t occur to me until the 1999 season. I absolutely would have gone if we’d have won the conference prior to that (I’m certain I’d still be paying off the credit card debt, but that was a problem for Future Frothy to address), but it was left in the part of my brain that thought it would have been cool to soar across the sky like a majestic eagle or walk barefoot on the sun. After the 1999 season, winning the conference and heading to Pasadena entered the realm of the possible. After the 2003 season, it became an obsession.

To the extent one can have a relationship with a sporting event, my relationship with the Rose Bowl was what the kids might call toxic. I did the bad thing where you take something tangible – a football game – and turn it into a concept. In the abstract, that’s totally fine: making something more than what it is gives us rivalry games, exciting riots outside of soccer stadia, money, and countries. It is a lot less totally fine when you let that concept turn into, like, a life objective, where you will die alone, sweaty, and unfulfilled if it is not achieved. And it turns out, no matter how hard I wished, how aggressively I hit at the haters on Twitter, or how many sit-ups I did (I didn’t do many sit-ups and am now certain this is why we never won the B1G), the Gophers making the Rose Bowl was not something I had any control over. Zero. None. I may as well have let the fulfillment of my life be dictated by the windsock at the local airport.

So, hell yeah I had a plan for when the Gophers made it. I was going to fly into Vegas with a friend or two a few days after Christmas, win enormous amounts of money playing craps, rent an Aston Martin, drive to LA at 130mph, get an aggravated reckless driving and spend a night in jail, cover up my ankle monitor to watch the Rose Bowl parade, and soak in the culmination of my hard work with 50,000 of my best friends all in maroon and gold as the Gophers took the field with the sun setting on the San Gabriel mountains. If I’d have died right then, I would have been sweaty, but not alone and definitely not unfulfilled.

But, yeah, you know, we never made it. When the regular season game at UCLA was announced last year, I really wasn’t sure what to do. I’d put the Rose Bowl in that compartment of things I never got to achieve – test pilot, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, giraffe – where there was whiff of bittersweetness, but you’re mostly over it. How would I feel, though, going to that hallowed ground under different circumstances? No parade, no 100,000 people, no blimp, no ankle monitor? I was going, then I wasn’t going, then Indiana crushed UCLA and I was in under the rationale that UCLA was terrible and it would be fun to watch us win a road game. Plus, most of my Gopher friends were going and it’d be good to hang with them regardless of the outcome or other circumstances.

So, I went. It was complicated walking down into the valley where the Rose Bowl sits, seeing the iconic signage on the front of the stadium, watching the sun set on the mountains. But it was also shockingly not special. Drinking beers in the tailgate lots, being frustrated with offensive line play, watching Perich destroy entire civilizations of innocents.

It was just a normal game at the Rose Bowl with probably 15,000 of my best friends all in maroon and gold. Maybe the real Rose Bowl was all those friends we made along the way.

Tailgates & Tums

2024-09-23T14:52:00.003-05:00

The vibes were immaculate.

The tailgates lots around the stadium were filled with heavy traffic of smiling, excited Gopher fans. Black and gold flags, tents, and shirts were in the minority on a day of August weather, the earliest in the season that Floyd of Rosedale has ever been contested. A late afternoon downpour failed to dampen spirits or send people packing; nervous energy and cautious optimism followed the crowds to Huntington Bank Stadium.

Max Brosmer picked up where the tailgate left off and it appeared that, like the previous two weeks, the coaches were letting him cook. Before the half, he was 17 of 26 for 165 and two touchdowns. The defense that clocked Minnesota's first back to back shutouts since 1962 held the Hawkeye's improved offense to 107 yards. Few times has the Minnesota spellout at Huntington Bank been louder than it was after Elijah Spencer's touchdown.

At Halftime, something happened. Back to back Iowa touchdowns in 5 and 7 plays. Minnesota chose to run the ball, three and out. Both O-Line and D-Line were dominated by Iowa in one of the most comprehensively disastrous 3rd Quarters since the Tim Brewster era. When the clock wound mercifully down, what had been one of the smallest and quietest Iowa crowds in my 25 years of fanhood now dominated the emptying stands and their chants filled the concourse. I walked back to Washington Avenue ramp alone in frustrated silence. In the parking spot next to my truck, a fistfull of half-crushed antacid tablets lay on the concrete.

Medicine? Or Metaphor?

The change in offensive strategy in the 2nd half was puzzling in the moment and perplexing in retrospect. Post-game PJ Fleck referenced Iowa's fast scores out of halftime as "...like a boa constrictor, and you better start scoring some points really quick." Yet in his press conference this morning he referenced a conscious decision to run the ball and nurse the lead.

Coach Fleck is unquestionably a smart guy, so perhaps he had a plan to convert that cognitive dissonance into positive action. For the fans, we are reduced to trusting what is said, but believing what is done. And what we've seen is a tendency over time to revert to comfortable conservatism in big game situations, which Saturday's effort seems to have reinforced. One might reasonably question if the objective data (1-7 record against Iowa in 8 years) supports this approach. Maybe something new might be warranted; 79 rushing yards isn't it.

Next week Minnesota faces a Michigan team that ran the ball 46 times for 290 yards against USC, and only needed to throw 12 times. If Minnesota focuses on the run again in the Battle for the Jug, we will be in for a very long Saturday.

Let. Brosmer. Cook.

An Ode

2024-08-23T08:00:00.001-05:00

I identify a difference between “happiness” and “joy”. I associate “happiness” with a state of satisfaction relating to a specific event or thing; seeing a dog playing or getting a free order of breadsticks. “Joy” denotes something greater; a wider state of mind and being that envelopes you with contentment.

Sometime in the late summer of 2020 I became aware of an emotional void I struggled to define. As August turned to September I remarked to my wife that I felt like I was losing my capacity to feel joy. In the dark days of that year I had still managed to find a wide range of emotions including happiness, but the feeling was incomplete…emotional autopilot.

About a month ago a funny thing happened; the details don't matter. Sufficed to say my state of mind was changing and a weight was lifting. I still felt ups and downs, got frustrated, mad, sad. But recovery was faster, my general outlook sunnier. Last weekend I sat with friends at Stub & Herb’s and then at Huntington Bank Stadium for a closed Gopher football practice. Watching the sun set against the Minneapolis skyline it hit me: for four years I’ve had a stunted capacity for joy, and it’s suddenly back.

I’ve decided not to get swallowed in deep reflection on it and simply accept it. Not everything requires a monk-like meditation, and sometimes the universe gives you a gift. On Saturday we all get such a moment: college football is back.

A lot has happened and a lot is different. NIL and the transfer portal have changed a lot. And yet, nonetheless, there is joy to be found. Time marches on, change is eternal; we have been here before, we will be here again. The ACC Coastal Division is gone, but new Big XII looms to fill the chaos void. PAC-12 After Dark is dead, but even the most shriveled part of my brain squeezes out an endorphin at the thought of an 11 PM start to the 4^th Quarter of Michigan State at Oregon. The Rose Bowl has changed forever, but later this year we will slather coaches in mayonnaise and eat a breakfast toaster mascot.

As for our beloved Gophers, I know next to nothing and I’m fine with that. I hear tell rumors that we are practicing a new concept called “Special Teams”. Our quarterback sings both kinds of music: country AND western. I misheard Donielle “Nuke” Hayes’s name as “Duke Nukem” so that’s his name now as far as I’m concerned. We will finish somewhere between 2-10 and 10-2; it’s going to depend a lot on which team scores more points. Whatever happens, I’ll be there with my wife and son, extended family, and closest friends watching the sun go down over Minneapolis…yelling, joking, hugging, sighing, and laughing.

There is sufficient bad and sufficient good to be found in this season, like in all seasons before. It’s all about where you choose to look. My friends, this season I encourage you to choose joy.

Row the Boat, Ski-U-Mah, Go Gophers

20 years later - Michigan 2003

2023-11-22T13:43:00.002-06:00

Sports aren’t important. Relative to family, friends, one’s community, religion, pets, and professional life, the performance of one’s sports teams really ought not to have a meaningful impact on one’s life. It’s just a bunch of people moving an object from one place to another using their hands, feet, or sticks against a bunch of other people trying to steal the object for themselves. It’s an absurdity that it garners any attention at all.

And yet, sports, in a lot of ways, are everything. They are a magnet that binds people of a certain affinity together while repelling groups with different value systems. They allow for the (mostly) healthy release of tribal energies, enable the resolution of regional rivalries that historically would have been solved with lots of fires and cannibalism, and create common experiences among people with widely disparate professions, faiths, and interests.

We dedicate meaningful percentages of our lives to our teams at games, watching them on TV, following recruiting, drafts, and trades/transfers. We vent our spleens on message boards, social media, at bars and tailgates, and in angry emails to GMs/athletic directors. They are deeply emotional. We share and treasure the moments of transcendence, when our teams do something we always wanted them to do - for years, every time we get together. And we commiserate with one another after particularly bad things, collectively sharing the trauma, comforted that we don’t have to experience that despair alone.

Boy, as a Gopher fan, that last sentence really resonates. As I’ve said before, Minnesotans are a mostly miserable people: we fixate on the negative, perpetually assume the worst, and then, when the worst happens, preen publicly to let the few optimists know how right we were. It’s a pathology of negative attention where the positive experiences can’t be fully enjoyed because, well, the piper, he must be paid treble damages for every moment of joy. It’s true in most facets of our lives – I’m guessing it’s a vitamin deficiency or Eeyore pooping copiously in the water – but it is particularly evident in the context of sports. And it’s particularly particularly evident for Gopher sports. And particularly particularly particularly evident for the football version of Gopher sports.

For many Gopher football fans of a certain age, October 10^th, 2003 is the single most important day of their fandom. There may be games they recall more clearly. Stories of plays that they share more often at tailgates. Even losses that, today, feel more acute. But many, most, or all Gopher fans who were old enough to be aware of the significance of the game that day carry something with them. It changed their experience as sports fans and supporters of the program. Sometimes it affected their relationships and views on life. It gave some a new purpose. To others, it serves as a constant reminder of what can never be. I’m not sure any of us have ever watched a game the same way again.

(Link to the game if you just need to feel like the inside of an ass hole for three hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-kW3JFKH4M)

I’ve met a lot people through my affiliation with the Gophers during my 40-odd years of fandom, many of whom I consider to be among my best friends. Now that we’re past the 20-year anniversary of that game, a group of us thought it would be worthwhile to memorialize what we recall from the lead up to the 2003 Michigan contest, our varied experiences during the game, how we felt afterward, and how, if at all, it continues to affect us today.

Some of the participants, while die-hard Gopher fans today, were not fans in 2003. Their perspectives are an important contrast to those of us who lived every moment of the Michigan game, as it says something about the diverse experiences we have as supporters of the same program: we all may view the 2023 Northwestern game as a massive disappointment; but 4^th quarters like that evoke a particular set of emotions for those of us who witnessed October 10^th, 2003.

What's the first thought that comes to you when someone brings up Michigan 2003?

Wasn’t a fan at the time so the searing pain doesn’t resonate, but it feels like a missed opportunity. MH, 32 years old

Searing pain and the feeling of immense loss. It is the Gopher Sports equivalent to me of someone bringing up the loss of a close family member. @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

Horror. Frustration. Watching a trainwreck that you can’t stop. Having hopes and dreams snatched from the jaws of victory. Grinning Glen bent over with his hands on his knees. Pain and suffering. In retrospect, probably one of the top 10 worst days outside of someone actually leaving the earth. It is the Gopher football equivalent of “where were you when <fill in a horrific world event> SN, 44

First thought that comes to mind is that game might be the biggest missed opportunity this program has had…which is saying something considering the plethora of missed opportunities this program has had through the years. @vits14, 45

Pain. And Glen Mason grimacing, bent at the waist with his hands on his knees; the burden of greatness being too heavy for him to bear. It was the first time I felt that signature Gopher Sports anger/shame cocktail where everyone else but the coaching staff did what we were supposed to do. The fans showed up, the band showed up, the team even showed up for the most part, and the coaching staff just couldn’t hold up their end, so none of our dreams came true. We were left to feel like idiots for daring to

believe. Stepper, 40

Abject existential dread. It's a trauma stored in my body as a tinge of the liver, bowels tied in knots, and the type of nausea that usually arrives arm-in-arm with a fifteen-beer hangover. Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

Just a massive missed opportunity. A true what could have been/sliding doors moment. There was a sadness about that game that stuck with me for a long time that has never been matched and it’s because of the build up and what was so close. Even though we were very close to the B1G West title and Rose Bowl in 2019, the impact to me wasn’t as great as 2003. Just a true gut punch - where you wake up day after day saying “It’s real and I can’t believe it happened.” SG, 46

Defend the screen pass. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

Walk me through your recollection in the lead up to that game. How did you prepare, what were the vibes like, what do you remember most about the tailgate?

I was in my first senior year and 4th year in the Minnesota Marching Band. The non-academic part of my week was mostly taken up with rehearsals, 2 hours every Monday-Thursday, plus basketball/hockey band rehearsals. The previous two weeks were away games (W @ Penn State, W @ Northwestern) so we had three full rehearsal weeks to prepare, which meant that for nearly a month, the Michigan game was on my mind. I don’t remember much about the rehearsals but what I DO remember is how winnable the game looked, and how that feeling gradually transformed from wishful thinking to some level of reality. Michigan had lost the previous weekend in Iowa City, and they’d lost earlier in the season at Oregon. One of the people saying it was winnable was our director, Jerry Luckhardt, himself a Michigan Man. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

This is where my memory gives out. I was also a die hard Twins fan, and so I was jacked up about the Gophers amazing season, jacked up about the Twins in the playoffs, and just generally jacked up by having an amazing Marching Band season. My whole life as a Gopher fan (from Chris Darkins on) it was never a part of the deal that we would be good. Each time a new team went to the Rose Bowl we’d get to say “we’d still win the tie-breaker since we haven’t been in the longest!” but knowing full well that even tying for the Big Ten title wasn’t in the cards for us. The Rose Bowl became more a feature of the conversation now that bowl games were something I would travel to as a member of the band, which I never did as just a fan. This season we started the math for how many wins we need to get to that tie in the same joking manner as always, but it got really real during the week leading up to it. Talking about marching in the Rose Parade came up a lot. When the game got moved to Friday Night we were all thrown by the change to our schedule, but were mainly just excited we knew it would be a sellout. Stepper, 40

It’s what everybody was talking about all week. There was just a buzz. It was a palpable excitement. It was the top story for the media, the casual fans were into it, people were wanting tickets to go. Again, something that I haven’t seen matched - even the lead up to the 2019 PSU game. It truly felt like the whole state was invested in this game. I went to Hubert’s before the game and I just remember how packed it was in there and how excited everybody was. I don’t remember going to the tailgate lots, but I’m sure we went to the Plaza at some point to see the band march in before going into the game. SG, 46

There was an effervescence on campus building from whispers to a choral swell of belief I hadn’t experienced before. I can vividly recall two details. First, the Vice Provost of Students at the time also served as my faculty chaperone for a May session study abroad course in Argentina the prior year. So when he blasted on an email to the entire student body advising us to act responsibly, there was a palpable feeling of, “Oh shit — I know this guy, and he’s legitimately concerned we’re gonna torch the campus again, just like after hockey won the national championship.” The second thing I recall was Lloyd Carr whining about moving the game to Friday night. Michigan looked vulnerable after losing on the road to Oregon and Iowa in the three weeks prior. In my mind, Carr was afraid and knew we had the advantage. This irrational exuberance led to a huge pre-game party at my fraternity house, complete with catering from Steak Knife. It was the first “big game” atmosphere I had experienced. Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

3: I was two years out of college and living in Albert Lea, MN at the time. I just remember how excited everyone was, even down there. It felt like everyone around AL was talking about the game. I had friends and family from all over the state reaching out to talk about it. They all wanted to know my thoughts and if the Gophers had a legit chance at winning the game. When it came to football, it was the first time that I can recall people reaching out to me to specifically talk about the Gophers and not the Vikings. There was a buzz around the program that hadn’t been there in a very long time. @vits14, 45

The Gopher game was all anyone talked about that week—the media, people on the street, everyone. And this was back at a time when it wasn’t that cool to be a Gopher fan. I hated that I usually saw more of other teams’ gear on our own campus than maroon and gold. People were typically apathetic at best during that time. There was usually very little on campus excitement that wasn’t sucked out by the dome, but that week was different. People were buzzing, lots of maroon and gold, lots of excitement. On a personal level, my Gopher-loving grandparents had both fairly recently passed away--one in a car accident (along with my great aunt) and one from complications of that car accident. I thought surely we would come out of the darkness, emerge from the desert, see the seas parted, and make it to the Rose Bowl at last. It was a particularly emotional week for me because I kept thinking about how excited they would be. SN, 44

Walk me through your recollection in the lead up to that game. How did you prepare, what were the vibes like, what do you remember most about the tailgate? I was involved with the marching band all through college, so if anything, I was pissed the game was moved to a Friday night rather than Saturday as it meant our typical schedule was all messed up. I remember feeling optimistic about the game as it was becoming clear that our rushing attack could not be stopped by anyone. The typical Twin Cities bandwagon fan was just ready for a winner and it looked like the Gophers might finally have a team that people could get behind. @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

Provide what you remember about the first three quarters. How was the crowd, how were you feeling, what do you remember about your thoughts/attitude?

I’ve watched it on YouTube, so perspective was limited but you could tell the crowd was electric. MH, 32

I’ll never forget getting on the field for the band pregame and looking into the stands, seeing it 90-95% gold cheering for the Gophers blew my mind. Then as the first 3 quarters rolled on, I remember feeling greater euphoria than even after 2019 Penn State. In the band, we were ready to march back to campus, triumphant. This game really showed that people would get behind the team and were ready to show up in support. The pictures of the crowd support that night were not matched until the team returned to campus. @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

What I should have included in question 2, is that there are still positive memories about that game, and those memories are what made 2019 start to feel special even earlier than 2003 did. Coming out of the tunnel for pregame with a packed crowd for the first time ever was intense and thrilling. We marched with our horns down into the compressed M formation, at which point we would get our horns up again and play Pageant as we expanded the M, followed by the Rouser. When the PA voice yelled “Are! You! Ready?!” The crowd went NUTS. As we flanked to go start Pageant, many band kids missed their first Stepper, 40 and/or never started playing their horn again because our jaws were hanging open in awe of the majesty of that crowd. Football-wise, I have never watched a recording of that game, so memories are spotty from the good parts. I do remember the play near midfield when AAK pulled the ball in for a QB Keep and disappeared into a pile of linemen. From our endzone section we didn’t see him and all though he must have been down after a yard. He suddenly emerged from inside the middle of the pile and ran untouched to the endzone and we all went ballistic. I can still see him popping out on his feet and running. It was when some of the bleeeeding had already started, it was 28-21 and that TD got us back out to 35-21. I remember thinking “okay, we got our cushion back, we should be good now.” Stepper, 40

The crowd was electric. I kind of went in with somewhat tempered expectations but thought there was a chance. At the half I was like man, this might be it! This might be it! We’re so close, how could we possibly NOT close this out! All of our demons of the 80s and 90s are being exercised and we are going to realize Gopher glory in the sun! SN, 44

The crowd was beyond electric. To have a whole Dome filled with maroon and gold was amazing. I personally had never seen an atmosphere like that. As much as the Dome sucked, it could get so loud. And to have it pretty much full as the band came out - just a moment you won’t forget. SG, 46

I watched the game at home, but I remember how you could feel the electricity of the crowd through the TV. There was definitely a buzz in the Dome that night. As for the game, I remember thinking that I wasn’t really all that surprised. I was probably surprised by the margin the Gophers jumped out to, but I wasn’t surprised they were winning. The team was that good that season. That said, I do vividly remember thinking for the first time in my Gopher fandom that the Rose Bowl was legitimately in play if not something even bigger. That feeling of watching something special unfold is one of the things I think about most when I look back on it. Then Lucy pulled the football out from Charlie Brown… @vits14, 45

The Dome was louder than ever, the sonic pressure quite literally pulsing as a current through the air. From games I’ve attended, the intensity of crowd noise that night has yet to be matched, rivaled only by Penn State in 2019. I had constructed so many narratives during the week, which were manifesting in the first half. The Wolverines had no answer for Maroney and Barber. We had Braylon Edwards and Steve Breaston locked down, and our defense had Chris Perry largely contained. Even when Michigan scored on their first possession after the half, we roared back with two more touchdowns. Me, shitfaced off the pint of Jack Daniels I snuck into the Dome, felt like we had ‘em on the ropes at the end of the third quarter. The Jug was ours, we were going to the Rose Bowl, and I was ready for Dionysian excess that surely awaited us all back on campus. Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

This was the most nervous and excited I had been before a game, period. I can’t speak for what it’s like for the band now, but at the time for Friday nights and 11 AM games you didn’t really have time to think; too much practical stuff to do. But this game I was nervous, in part because I had all day in class to stew about it, and that carried through all the way down the Metrodome tunnel. There are two major things I remember. First, in the tunnel even before you could see the crowd you could hear the stadium was packed; the decibel levels were high and it crackled with potential energy. Then you saw the crowd and it was different from any home crowd I’d seen before. It was already full before pregame started (highly unusual both then and now), it was almost all gold but from where we stood it was hard to tell how much of that was actually maize. Second, when we got to the part of pregame where we unfold the M from a narrow formation around the 50, the NOISE. The song used for Foldout is called “Fanfare ‘87” and the dynamic marking is fortissimo, “ff”, Italian for “blow as hard as you can”. The roar of the crowd hit with a physical force and the view of them standing looked like a giant, uncoordinated “wave”. I couldn’t hear myself play, I couldn’t hear the people near me play, I couldn’t hear the drumbeat. A few of people who could still hear the drums stopped playing and were shouting out the beat so we didn’t get off count. Never experienced anything like that before or since. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

Then things turned. Talk about what you remember about that, how vividly you remember things, what did it feel like? Is it like other things you've experienced or imagine experiencing?

At the end of the 3rd Quarter I was confident but reserved; I knew my history. It seems quaint in retrospect but I remembered the Micron PC.com Bowl from my rookie year, 2000 when we gave up a 24-8 halftime lead. I knew Glen Mason’s predilection to Prevent Defense when he had the lead. But 28-7 seemed pretty so a few of us did some quick math on how many scoring chances Michigan would have and calculated that all we had to do was stop 1 of them, and score 1 time ourselves, to win. The first Michigan drive of the 4th sucked, something like 1 minute or less to score. When Asad Abdul-Khaliq threw a Pick-6 a few minutes later my stomach was churning, but my friend Courtney reminded me “Biff, we score once and stop them once, we still win.” A few minutes later came a play I can still see in my mind’s eye. Near the 50 yard line on 3rd and Short, Asad Abdul-Khaliq picked up a seam in the middle of the Michigan D-line and shot through on a 52 yard run where he seemed to be accelerating the whole way. We fell all over each other and the stadium was deafening. I told myself to remember this moment…this specific moment, because THIS was when it all turned around. You tell your grandkids about it, they replay it every time Michigan comes to town, they build statues based on the pose. It was the time we finally learned to hit back. That moment just made the ultimate result more bitter. I went from feeling like I’d just witnessed history to realizing I’d only seen the exception that proves the rule. It was an immensely helpless feeling; “deflating” doesn’t do it justice. The adrenaline of the day, the physical exertion of the marching, playing, cheering, yelling, all left my body with the suddenness of a John Navarre screen pass and was replaced with nothing but frustration and lactic acid. I had never experienced that type of disappointment before; emotionally, it felt more like a betrayal of our fanhood and effort by a coach who couldn’t be bothered to see what was happening in front of him and attain sufficient self-awareness to break his tendencies. I felt cheated, robbed, and physically ill. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

Jack Daniels, as an elixir of false bravado, has a depressing mechanism of slowly transmuting into anger juice under certain conditions, like when Chris Perry accumulated a million yards worth of screen passes. AAK’s pick-6 was a body blow, the kidney shot that had me writhing in agony with my head in my hands. AAK’s response with the long touchdown was supposed to be his atonement, demonstrating that year’s team was different. But it was not to be, because Braylon Edwards and Chris Perry kept happening. I convinced myself watching the replay of Edwards’ touchdown catch that he didn’t have possession, an irrational belief I still hold despite knowing I was an unreliable narrator then. I have no good reason for holding on to this false construct anymore. No — the Earth is flat; it’s 5,000 years old, and Braylon didn’t catch that touchdown pass I spent the rest of the game in stunned, spinning silence and disbelief. Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

My first thoughts when the comeback began was that Michigan was just going to score your typical late game garbage time touchdown/s. I wasn’t concerned at all. Then Michigan scored again, and I thought to myself “hmmm, maybe the Gophers should do something to not give Michigan life/hope”. I think at one point I even started to nervously laugh at how bad the defense was playing. That nervous laughter turned into total disbelief in what was happening. All I could think was “how could they go from playing so dominantly to looking like they’ve never played football before?”. Once the game ended and the comeback was complete, I wasn’t even mad about it all, I was just dumbfounded by what I had witnessed. I couldn’t wrap my head around any of it. Like, how can a team rush for over 400 yards and lose?!? I didn’t even know that was possible. All these later and I still can’t understand how a team can rush for that many yards and lose a game. It’s mind boggling. Unfortunately, in retrospect, blown leads were the norm for Mason’s teams and was ultimately his undoing at the U. @vits14, 45

The bad plays that stayed with me are the fumble on the drive that gave them the go ahead field goal, and the interceptions. I long said that if I ever had genie wishes or access to a time machine, the first thing I would ask for is for Justin Frahley to fall on the Michigan fumble at his feet to get us the ball back. Then I would tell AAK not to throw those INTs. The theme of Mason being obsessed with Prevent Defense was a regular part of our in-game critiques I think by this point, so I remember all of us just begging them to not give receivers such big cushions and get more aggressive on D again. By the end of the 4th none my little group of 4-5 trombones was even playing songs in between plays anymore, and it was the softest and saddest Rouser to end the game that we had played to that point in my career. We’d all been throwing around the plan to march back to campus, but as soon as the game was over we just wanted to get on the busses as fast as possible. Stepper, 40

Like my face was stuck in a permanent shock look. Not understanding how it could happen and would someone just cover Chris Perry PLEASE! The ups and downs of that 4th quarter - after Asad scored, thinking we’ve got it. But we didn’t have it. I still don’t understand how. I don’t even remember how it ended or who had the ball last or anything about the final moments and that’s probably for the best. Just disbelief. And walking out of that game knowing that we blew it. That we were never getting that crowd back or the attention from the casuals back and that everybody the next day would be saying “Same old Gophers.” SG, 46

Sand started slipping through my fingers. Surely we will get it together and somebody will start tackling. Somebody will hit someone. This isn’t working and surely we will get back to playing how we were in the first three quarters. Surely they understand what’s at stake and make a defensive stop. Until there was no sand in my fingers whatsoever. Just emptiness. Disbelief. Despair. SN, 44

As the 4th quarter went on, I remember turning to one of my friends next to me and we looked dumbfounded that we played nothing but prevent defense and seemed to forget the screen pass is legal. I’ve never experienced anything like that hopelessness, but I imagine it is the feeling you have when you are in a plane heading towards the ground – hoping the pilots pull it out and wondering why us? @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

From watching on YouTube, it almost felt like I could will a different result into existence. How do you allow 38 second half points? How?! MH, 32

What did you do after the game? Why did you do that?

Quietest and quickest post-game band show ever and bus ride back from the dome, just pure depression from everyone wanting to get out of there. I think I went home and just went to bed feeling shell shocked. @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

I remember the aftermath much more clearly than the game itself. I was with a largish group of friends-only 2 of which understood or cared what this game meant. The three of us sat there for a long time. One of my friends-M-left the dome and some other friends caught up with him. They weren’t going to wait for those godforsaken buses so they started walking back to campus. I found out later that one of the non-knowing friends started asking M for relationship advice and became the historical champion of terrible timing. M couldn’t even speak or look at the question asker. That is probably the only part I look back on and laugh now. SN, 44

I remember driving down S. 7th Street talking on the phone to my sister and we were both pretty distraught/upset and not understanding how it happened. I can’t remember how long I talked to her or what I did when I got home, but I’m sure it was a sleepless night. SG, 46

First thing I did after the game was go for a walk. I needed to decompress and take it all in. Once I got back from my walk, I poured myself a strong drink and found a movie to watch. I didn’t want to think about the game whatsoever. I think I watched a comedy. Needed something to laugh at and feel good about. @vits14, 45

I was not a shining exemplar of maturity as a 20-year-old. As I was walking home with fraternity brothers across the 10th Ave bridge, I still had the empty pint of JD in my pocket. I took the bottle and chucked it as hard and far as possible into the river, hoping anything would alleviate my impotent rage. It did nothing. I could discard a bottle, but I couldn’t get rid of the emptiness I felt in my soul. Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

The band had no choice, we had to play. We had to form up into a parade block in the tunnel and march out to do a postgame show. As a section leader I was supposed to encourage my group and act as an example, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to try and tell my best friends in the world not to feel their feelings. I performed well enough to satisfy my personal pride but I didn’t judge anyone who couldn’t bring themselves to do it. There were some people who vocally said they were quitting. The bus ride back to campus was silent. I went to the basement of Northrop and changed out of my uniform by which time I had developed a screaming headache. I was sweaty and I stank but there weren’t any showers so I just changed into dry clothes and left. A friend had been so confident in our victory that he had stocked the tub in his apartment with ice and beers and invited everyone over for a postgame party. I biked my emotional husk there on auto-pilot and found a handful of friends sitting with thousand-yard stares and half-drank beers. I grabbed a beer from the tub, drank it as fast as I could but the coldness made my headache so bad that my vision started to narrow. I was exhausted and embarrassed; I felt like a fool to have believed. My friend was trying to cheer people up, but someone there (I don’t remember who) wouldn’t stop talking about how dumb we had all been and how THEY never thought we could do it. I just left, I didn’t have the emotional energy to argue and I was starting to get worried about my headache. I biked back to University Village, drank a glass of lukewarm water, took some ibuprofen and went to bed. I slept for at least 12 hours. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

In what circumstances do you think about the game now? How does it feel? Why do you suppose you still think about it?

I don’t retain details, dates, scores very well. Years get put into general buckets, and when I am around others with better memories I can be jogged into finer points coming back. 2003 was a great year for me in the band. I was given responsibility, I was living in a house with friends instead of the dorms, my buddies were seniors and going out with a bang, we won The Axe in glorious fashion. It was the best I’d ever had it as a Gopher fan in my whole life. I think back on it so happily. The MIchigan game sits there, staring at us from the shadows of an otherwise good year, reminding us that we dare not dream of anything more than that. It was the first time I’d ever realistically envisioned the Rose Bowl, and it lit a flame of unrequited devotion that would slowly build inside me like a frog boiling in a pot. Glen Mason made a bad team good. It was a lot of fun. He couldn’t make a good team great, but he’d already planted that seed in our minds that maybe we could dream bigger. The clock began to tick. Stepper, 40

The game completely jaded my view of Gopher football for 15 years. I’ve got the kind of borderline-obsessive personality where, if I’m into something and decide to support it, I’m ALL in. I hadn’t grown up in a college football house, neither of my parents went to college, and they were from Iowa. So once I decided to go to the U, I was 100% in and I immersed myself in everything I could find about the program history because I hadn’t been raised with it. I had what I thought was a good feeling of the ebbs and flows of the program, as well as what it was potentially capable of. I truly thought going into the 4th Quarter that I was witnessing “It”, the fabled turnaround that would restore our program. I went the other way after 2003; I don’t think I ever believed we really truly had a shot. 8-4, 9-3 if the schedule was easy. It wasn’t that I thought the deck was stacked against us, it was that I had no faith in our leadership to be able to deliver. Beating Wisconsin and Oregon later that year was great but it was like a skin graft…the scar tissue was still down there. Subsequent events mostly confirmed my bias. It took until November 9, 2019 for that to change. While many of you allowed yourselves to hope leading up to that Penn State game, I didn’t. I resolved to enjoy the game and the crowd and not be a downer for others. But at no point did I believe we would win until we actually did. Jordan Howden’s interception in the end zone right in front of my seats became another snapshot moment like the Khaliq TD run; as soon as I knew he caught it I sat in my seat and sobbed. Those tears carried the baggage of 15 seasons and the weightlessness I felt afterwards was the delayed dividend for what I had hoped that Michigan post-game was going to be. Now I think I’m able to think about it in a more healthy way. It doesn’t become a dark tunnel I go down that brings others down with me. It happened; it was the crown jewel of Missed Opportunities. But it doesn’t define the future. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

When I look back on the game, I have a lot of mixed feelings. I don’t necessarily just think about that game, I think of the season as a whole. As I mentioned above, the Michigan game was possibly the largest #MissedOpportunity this program has had, but the same thing could be said about the entire season. It was legitimately a program changing loss. I know some people scoff at that idea, but it really was. That said, it wasn’t just that game. As bad of a loss as Michigan was, I would say the loss to Michigan State the following week was the real dagger. The Rose Bowl was still on the table with some help, but the hangover effect was in play against MSU. They came out completely flat and dug themselves a major hole in the first quarter. By time they woke up and started playing it was too late. Then they got Kinnicked in Iowa to end the season, and if memory serves me correct on that game, it felt like the players had checked out since the #SpecialSeason had gone down the tank. The bubble burst on Mason after that season and he was fired three short years later. @vits14, 45

To steal a quote, “It hurts more but bothers me less.” I am trying to decide between ’03 Michigan and ’19 Iowa over what feels like the more significant missed opportunity. Both games are distillable to the outcome of a single play between sending us to the Rose Bowl versus what happened. Recency bias aside, at least with 2019, the shit sandwich was more palatable because of the delicious bread layers of Penn State and Auburn. And in the subsequent years, we keep beating Wisconsin and Nebraska. It feels different now, so I say it bothers me less. The program is healthier, supported more, and in a better spot 2003 requires a twirling bit of mental acrobatics constructing a counterfactual of the possible. Maybe we don’t piss ourselves against Sparty the following week. Maybe we go 7-1 and win the conference outright. Perhaps the U experiences a surge in interest from prospective students and alums, elevating the incoming student body test scores and class ranks, increasing donations, and other positive externalities associated with athletic success serving as the front door for the University. Maybe Glen Mason can hire better assistants who can coach and recruit. He wouldn’t acquiesce to defeat on the recruiting trail, and he’d get to build towards opening up TCF Bank Stadium. What if we had momentum and didn’t lose 15 in a row to the Badgers. We may be much further along as a program than we are now. Or not. That’s the part that hurts: we’ll never know Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

I look at the game still as one that absolutely impacts the program and the view of the program today. Win the game and it’s Roses and we maybe have the success as a University and a football program and athletic department that Wisconsin had due to their Rose Bowl. I think time has helped heal that loss (and winning more than losing and having seasons like 2019 helps), but it sucks that it was this massive opportunity to win the B1G and go to the Rose Bowl and really build something. It took away something that I think all Gophers fans have wanted so badly and is no longer a possibility. But I think greater than that, it was just another example of why this state never has fully embraced this program like our neighbors as I just remember being so mad at the time that they would all get to say again “Same old Gophers.” It sucks. SG, 46

It is so much worse now than it was at the time. Because we never made it to the Granddaddy and now we never will. At the time, I was 23 and it really hurt but there was always next year. Now at 44, it is a broken bone that was set wrong, grew back incorrectly, has no hope of healing, and cripples you over time. It is the sharpness of acute pain vs. the weight and demoralization of chronic pain. The Gophers in the Rose Bowl is the one thing on my bucket list that I can’t control and will never achieve. SN, 44

This game above all others lingers in my thought process towards Gopher Football. I’ve seen every collapse since the inexplicable 2000 jNU homecoming loss and the Michigan game hurts more because of what that victory would have meant to the entire program. @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

It feels like a missed opportunity but I also realize it was only game 7. It’s possible we stumble elsewhere. I think 2014 Wisconsin, 2019 Iowa, 2019 Wisconsin hurt me more. If any of those 3 turn the other way the West is guaranteed won. MH, 32

In retrospect, would you choose to experience that again if you were able to go back to the day before the game?

Yes. The buildup to Gameday in 2019 was similar based off what’s been described . Being that relevant in the sport is what we live for. Imagine having the opportunity for a 2019 Penn State moment more often. MH, 32

I would, nothing in Gopher Football has matched those feelings from the first 3 quarters since. That team still caught the attention of everyone, it just didn’t turn out how we hoped it would. @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

Yes, because I am a Gopher fan. It is inside me and there is good that has come with all of the bad. Good in the form of friends, travel, experiences, and family time that I would have missed out on if not for Gopher fandom. But if I could elect to take a Mike Tyson punch to change the outcome, I absolutely would. I would choose physical pain every time if it could change the fourth quarter. SN, 44

Absolutely. The euphoria and the build up to that game was unmatched. This time I would leave after the 3rd quarter though. Or tell Asad to just fall down at the 2 yard line instead of score too quickly. SG, 46

Absolutely. I grafted the outcome of that game onto my DNA, the biometric key granting access to the intersubjective consciousness of Gopher fans. It is a torment and pain I cannot escape, but I don’t have to face it alone because many of my closest friends experienced the exact moment. There is catharsis and healing from sharing stories. Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

I’d absolutely go through that experience again, which we did in 2019. That was big time football. You want to feel the stakes rise with each passing week. That’s what makes college football so great. The atmosphere, the pageantry, the drama, the emotional highs, and lows, etc. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it all. It’s difficult at times being a fan of a program like Minnesota…and the power brokers keep moving the proverbial goal posts to ensure the power programs remain the power programs. We don’t get to experience too many seasons like that where we are mentioned with the power programs. So, when they do happen, it makes it that much more special when they rise up and have a season like that. Minnesota sports teams have historically invented ways to come up short on the big stage. We all know the history. The 2003 Michigan game and the entire season was the Gophers version of the Vikings 98 and Brett Favre seasons. It was all there for the taking, yet they somehow managed to choke it all away. The season didn’t turn out the way we wanted, but wow, there was some fun football played that season. @vits14, 45

I’m legitimately not sure. It depends a lot on if I knew it was coming or not. I think there are moments in your life where you really know you’re alive, above and beyond the default mode of existence. Intensity of emotion and thought which has a literal physical effect and shocks you into “the moment”. Those can be good or bad, but when they happen there is absolutely no doubt that you’re a thinking, feeling human being experiencing fucking LIFE. You don’t forget those moments: when I saw my wife in her wedding dress for the first time, when I held my baby for the first time, when my dad stopped breathing. I don’t mean to equate a sporting event with those life moments, it’s not at the same level it’s nowhere near important. But if there is an analogous fanhood version of that kind of life-shaking impact, the 2003 Michigan game is it. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

Hell yes. I was young, happy, and hopeful. Surrounded by friends in the prime of our lives, yelling cadences and making up songs that most of the fans at games would never notice. People CHEERED for us when we came out of the tunnel. They went nuts and yelled when we played the Rouser. They spelled MINNESOTA in a deafening roar. I think about that feeling all the time. I ask people all the time how folks who don’t like sports ever get to feel euphoria. How do you ever get to feel total joy, communal rejoicing, and complete devastation (and still get to go home to mostly just move on with your life unchanged) without sports? I am an emotionally reactive person. It has lots of consequences for me in my real life. But I don’t want to put a lid on it and risk losing those highs and lows. I don’t ever want to go to a game with that much at stake and not feel the total extremes of every feeling I can have. It’s the whole point. Stepper, 40

How, if at all, has the outcome of that game affected your life outside of Gopher sports?

I think that game gave me a certain jaded-ness towards the program. It’s hard to walk into most “big” games thinking that it’s going to end well. It’s that always waiting for the other shoe to drop feeling. And some point it’s almost comical that it is never us and believing that it never will be us. I feel a win that night has everybody looking at Minnesota different and so maybe I’m different today as an alum. As I’ve gotten older and things have happened in my life, I’ve been able to downgrade the importance and impact the wins and losses have on my life and I know 2003 me would have been devastated knowing the Rose Bowl was no longer an option and that we never made it in my lifetime. Today, as the playoffs and conferences change, it’s more thinking about what does this mean for me as a fan when there isn’t that big Pasadena dream out there anymore and the chances of winning the B1G are slim. So again, it feels like that October night in 2003 was just THE most massive missed opportunity of many missed opportunities that this program has had. SG, 46

The positive side: I have read many studies that have shown that resilience is one of the key defining characteristics of successful people. I feel that Gopher fans have that in spades, so there’s that. The negative side: Something was lost inside of me that day. I don’t get too hopeful about things out of my control. I try to control everything that I can, probably to extremes. Who knows to what extent that stems from other events in my life or this one. I have no question that I am a different person now than if we would have held on. For better or worse, who knows I guess. SN, 44

Not much outside of getting tired of folks who aren’t Gopher fans saying “Same old Gophers” every time something doesn’t go our way. The Vikings haven’t been as relevant in nearly as long as the Gophers, yet that ineptitude on the pro level hasn’t lessened the ability for the fans to cheer them on every year. Why not the Gophers too then? @KEVINZINTHETC, 44

No tangible change to my life, but Gopher football in general has impacted my life. I’ve met lifelong friends and my future wife because of Gopher football. MH, 32

It left me with an unachievable dream to feel victory and vindication, watching the sun set on the San Gabriel mountains from the Rose Bowl. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first time I would really take to heart that no matter how much I want something to happen, do my part, pay my price, make my investment, the thing that means the most to me in the world is determined by 18-22 year old young men and egotistical men who may never be ready to accomplish that dream. And now it’s too late and that dream can’t ever come true. Our chances in 2015, 2019, 2021, and 2022 are gone. We missed the boat. While a lifelong Gopher fan, I have really dug in even further now than I was when I was in band, due to this group of friends and my band alum friends building this team and these traditions up to be a big part of our lives and our futures. I have invested my time and emotions in a more purposeful way. I have chosen to make this a year round part of my life because of the community and family I get to feel from all of you. From the Fan Advisory Board, to the Broken Chair, to using my season ticket holder discount to buy 20% off tickets for strangers to help sellout games, to making public outcries to ensure everyone knows their stripe color for the first Stripe-Out, to making sure everyone is drinking Duck Duck Beer. I am doing everything I can do as a fan without Booster Money to make my experience as full, fun, successful, and memorable as possible. And when we do all of that, break the records, show up with heretofore unmatched energy and passion… but the team still loses, it really sucks. I have learned from all of those heart breaks that the only question I need to ask myself is “would I do anything differently?” The answer to that has always been “No.” I don’t want to be a casual fan. I like being devoted to this and sharing it with my friends. I like how the hope feels as it shows up sneakily and then overtakes me without me realizing it. I like being able to say “us” and “we” when I talk about the team. When the good is good, it’s the best. And every time I do everything they ask, wear the right color, pump up the casual fans and draw them back in, yell on defense, stay through Hail! Minnesota, but the coaches and the team fall short of holding up their end I’ll get that shame/anger cocktail again. I did my part. Why can’t they ever do theirs? Why do I keep letting them make a fool out of me? And I need to heed the lessons I’ve learned since 2003. Would I do anything differently? No. The Good is worth waiting for. 2015, 2019, 2022. I am going to keep doing my part, hoping eventually they’ll do theirs too and we’ll discover what the new dream is then. Stepper, 40

Mostly it’s become a benchmark of disappointment to score other things against. Not many qualify. For a long time, my extreme level of disappointment that lingered after this game colored my reaction to other disappointments, which the Gophers have provided generously. That affected my life outside of Gopher sports in the sense that I had days and weeks that negatively affected my mood and in extreme cases led to some behaviors that were unhealthy and even hurtful to others. I don’t think it was *only* the Michigan game that did that, but I think it started there. I’m pleased to say I’ve put that behind me, or at least I think I have. Only took 15 years. @biffthetick (https://twitter.com/biffthetick), 41

The impact it has had on my life is just wondering what could have been. What experiences did I potentially miss out on because they couldn’t finish the deal? Where would the program have gone from there? Would recruiting have had an uptick? Would it have taken another three years to get approval for the stadium? The Texas Tech debacle probably doesn’t cost Mason his job. The 10-year mistake of hiring Brewster definitely doesn’t happen. Adam Weber doesn’t get royally effed over. So, so, so many dominoes ultimately fell as a result of that game and season that it is really hard to comprehend it all. @vits14, 45

The misery I suffered fueled a passion for writing about this cursed team, and without that drive, I don’t know where I’d be today. FBT allowed me to cover the team as a media member, but more personally, it was my creative escape and outlet from a dark chapter. I can joke now that “maybe the real Rose Bowl was the friends I met along the way,” but it’s true. Fellow bloggers and readers are the core of a friend group dating back a decade. I travel with them. I’m watching two of them get married next year as a groomsman. When my marriage was crumbling, full of doubt, and I didn’t think I had anyone to turn to, they were a soft landing. A reader reached out and offered me an interview when I was facing unemployment: my enthusiasm for Gopher football and data-driven storytelling landed me two consecutive jobs, propelling my career for the following decade. I cannot understate how much influence and intertwined the trajectory of my life is with Gopher football — and so much of it comes right back to a single game. That incandescent pain forged resilience and gratitude to not take moments of collective glory for granted. And it's the membership dues for a club I never applied for, but I am thankful I was accepted nonetheless. Matt Humbert (@MVofBOT), 40

Sometimes things are real, sometimes things are raw, and sometimes things are real raw. This content definitely falls into the third category.

I think a lot of Gopher fans feel like they’re staring into the abyss now. The B1G West and its relatively straightforward path to the B1G championship game is going away. Four new teams that, by just about any measure, are better positioned for success than our Gophers, are joining the conference. We’re facing financial hurdles in coaching salaries and NIL that are not competitive with the top teams in Power 5 conferences, a separation that will become all the more acute as the sport evolves into a Power 2 structure. And we are experiencing the program’s worst performance under Fleck immediately before a season where the difficulty is switched up a few notches. The future looks pretty bleak.

Part of the purpose of this work was cathartic. Sometimes sharing how you feel about a bad thing can help resolve how badly you feel about it. The pernicious and intrusive memories of that game can be mitigated by knowing we’re not alone in how we feel. It doesn’t necessarily make it better; but it helps to know others carry the same burden, that we’re not defective in some way for feeling the way we do.

I think the main catalyst for doing it, though, is it’s a perfect metaphor for the human experience. You can look at the purpose of life as climbing a mountain, where anything other than reaching the peak is failure. Or you can look at life’s purpose as a dance, where you adapt and adjust based on the music and the actions of your partner without a specific goal or objective. Yeah, maybe that’s loser cope talking, and I’ll accept that; but the broader point is adversity and failure are inherent parts of all of our lives. That something as unimportant as a college football game can evoke such emotional depth 20 years later says a lot about how that adversity defines who we are. That we still choose to be passionate about the team responsible for that adversity says a lot more about resilience and hope.

Gopher football hasn’t won anything of real significance in my life. They’ve never reached the mountain’s peak. It’s entirely possible they never will. But the people who comprise the Gopher football fan base, their belief to persevere despite hardship, to support the team financially and through community building, to show up year after year regardless of the burden of past failures – that’s a hell of a tribe. And the tribespeople who contributed to this piece and others like them – they make great partners for the dance of life.

The World Wonders

2023-11-11T21:04:00.006-06:00

Reeled from the sabre stroke

Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

November 3, 2018 Minnesota lost a shocker to 3-5 Illinois, 55-31. The high score made the game seem more respectable than it was. No Minnesota fan watching in real time could have considered it anything other than an embarrassment. The next day, P.J. Fleck announced the firing of his friend, Defensive Coordinator Robb Smith, and his replacement with Joe Rossi. The change paid immediate dividends the following week against Purdue, a respectable loss against 9-5 Northwestern, and a win in Madison redeemed the season.

November 11, 2023 Minnesota lost a shocker at 2-7 Purdue, 49-30. The high score made the game seem more respectable than it was. No Minnesota fan watching in real time could have considered it anything other than an embarrassment. The next day…well, we don’t know yet, but it probably won’t be much. Joe Rossi has earned far more rope than Robb Smith did thanks to the performance of his defensive unit over the past several years; he’s not going anywhere, nor do I think he should.

Yet, Minnesota in Year 7 finds itself in a nearly identical position it found itself in Year 2, 5-5 with a sure-loss next week against Big Ten East Division leader Ohio State, and then a bowl trip on the line against Wisconsin to end the regular season. Wisconsin looks awful, and it won’t be shocking if Minnesota takes home both Floyd of Rosedale and the Axe in 2023 and goes bowling for the 5^th time in 7 seasons. Most Minnesota fans of the past 60 years would have considered that a great outcome.

But the price of success is a change of expectations, and in Year 7 a performance equaling Year 2 is no longer acceptable to most fans, trophies or not. Going into this season, I predicted a 7-5 finish; we’re not that far off, and yet I’m profoundly disappointed. Is this unreasonable, especially given our historical futility?

I don’t think so. Minnesota finds itself in a bowl-elimination game against its biggest rival only because it failed to show up in the 2^nd half of three completely winnable games against Northwestern, Illinois, and Purdue. Ironically, our relative success against our rivals in the Fleck era (especially Wisconsin) is cheapened by our consistent under-performance against teams at or below our own level.

One doesn’t require a deep dive in statistics to see what’s happening, it’s as predictable as the sunrise. A descent offensive start, inexplicable coverage gaps, poor clock management, continued defensive regression, a sleep-walked 3^rd Quarter in which we spot our opponents multiple scores. Our game plan seems to assume we’ll be up 4 touchdowns at half every game; we never are, and we seem unable to adjust. If our players were straight-up being beaten 1:1 it would be at least explicable if not excusable. With rare exception, that’s not what is happening.

Take NIL, recruiting, the future of the program and the conference and college football overall out of it. Hell, take the 1^st Half of today’s game out of it. Minnesota was down 22 with just over 10 minutes left in the 4^th Quarter and opted for a Field Goal, cutting a 3 score game down to a 3 score game. It tells you everything you need to know about the decision-making process for this program.

The plan for the program seems to be “take the points and hope”. It’s not working against the middle of the Big Ten West. How do we think it will fare against Washington and Oregon in 2024?

After the win over #4 Penn State in 2019 P.J. Fleck said “I’m sure there was some people on the final drive who said ‘Oh, here we go again.’ Gotta let go of all of that…we’ve got to change at some point.” Minnesota HAS changed, and expectations change with it; that’s called growth. Fleck himself has said we’re “not going back”. Fans took him at his word and believed. The world is providing real-time feedback that what’s happening isn’t working.

“…we’ve got to change at some point.” At what point does that include the coach’s approach to game management? The world wonders.

This too Shall Pass: A tale of two tattoos

2023-11-06T16:30:00.002-06:00

This is a weird one in that I feel it most in my teeth. Not sure that’s ever happened before. Can’t say I’m a fan.

I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping myself distracted after a particularly inconceivable loss by spending time outside, going to get a nice meal, getting unimaginably high, or trying to feel something again by dying hundreds of times in a Sisyphean quest to complete Dark Souls-styled video games. Sometimes all of the above.

But, residing inside of a piece of meat controlled by a brain that is predisposed to do its own thing on occasion, I do regularly get intrusive thoughts. Saturday was like Christmas for the secret Santa responsible for these nuggets of fun, and it has since gifted me with joyous visions of our WR dropping a TD that would have won us the game, a laser beam going through the hands of our TE where a catch would have won us the game, and Illinois’ best WR running right through the defense we thought was on the ascendancy to win them the game. On repeat. For days. Like finding a wet turd in your pocket every time you reach for some mints.

Anyway, as I’ve said a few times on here, I usually feel that – not even sure what to call it…dread, maybe? the abyss staring back into me? – somewhere between my stomach and my heart. This time it’s, like, in my molars. A tingly ache that goes away as soon as I redirect the thought, but a constant reminder that, yes, losing that game was very sad. As if I needed that prompt.

I’m pretty tatted up. One of the tattoos on my forearm is amor fati in ancient Greek script. Yes, I took a Latin phrase and converted it not to Greek, but ancient Greek. While I am open to criticism of being an extremely basic bitch for doing this, I think my reasoning was sound: I intensely dislike making small talk with people and had no interest in explaining something people could read on my arm. This doesn’t explain the “Live, Laugh, Love” sleeve on my other arm, but that’s for a different blog.

Amor fati is roughly translated as “love of one’s fate” and, while it didn’t originate with influential/misunderstood German philosopher and syphilis haver Friedrich Nietzsche, it is a semi-familiar concept today because of his works. The idea is rooted in the idea of eternal recurrence: what if the life we have lived and will live is repeated in its exact form for eternity? There are probably parts of everyone’s life that would be done differently or where a different outcome was desired.

Under eternal recurrence, these aren’t options, and one must accept the good and the bad. Nietzsche framed amor fati as the uncompromising position to not simply bear that state of being, but that one should love that burden, as to negate it is to deny one’s existence. The tribulations occasionally or often inherent in every person’s life don’t make one a better person, but they do make one more complete (Neitzsche would say “profound”) and, at any rate, are required phenomena in the context of eternal recurrence for us to also experience the good:

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.

Still got hope dot com: your home for grossly oversimplifying the ideas of modern philosophical giants and The Will to Power references. Hang with me for one more minute and then we’ll get to the extended point, which, shocker, is Gopher football related.

Anyhow, I got that tattoo because I am extremely bad at letting things go. I ruminate, obsess, and catastrophize over totally insignificant events. For years. I overanalyze and assume the worst in every social interaction. When a bad thing happens socially or at work, my default position is everyone sees it and now hates me.

Those processes are an artifact from old ways of thinking that prohibit progress. Amor fati sits in a place where I can see it at all times. It’s there to prod me to stop regretting the past or being anxious about the future. The need for that message was so important that I permanently marked up my body to make it part of my being. A lot of people have throwaway tattoos, stuff from spring break or memorializing things that were important in one’s youth, but have no relevance in middle age. This one, for me, though, is a way of life. It’s who I aspire to be and a reminder that the good sometimes comes with the bad. An affirmation to move forward and love whatever that entails.

Thus concludes the longest context setting since Atlas Shrugged. On we go, with a transition as subtle as a hammer to the face.

You know who else has a tattoo? PJ Fleck. His runs vertically along the back of his calf and reads “This too shall pass.” Alas, no, it is not a descriptor of his preferred offensive strategy (“This too shall drain the air out of the ball, turtle until the clock strikes 0:00, and generally operate as a sphincter that never isn’t causing constipation” would have required the length of seven PJ Fleck calves), but a maxim that he uses to maintain emotional consistency.

It makes sense: he’s a super high-energy guy with an enormous amount of responsibility; one who wants to celebrate every moment of his life while operating in a profession where people are venerating you one week and vengefully planning your ouster the next. In the same way amor fati reminds me to not be a miserable and neurotic weirdo, his tattoo serves to keep him grounded between the emotional highs and lows of a Power 5 football coach: experience and feel things in the moment, knowing everything, the good and bad, is ephemeral. Mono no aware for uber-high-achieving millionaires.

It also fits within the public image of Fleck as a growth-mindset, power of positive thinking sort of guy. “Failure is growth,” “change your best,” and “this too shall pass” mesh nicely together in the context of one’s personal philosophy, as failure is less an absolute state of being and more of a transitory period from which one emerges as a better person. One will experience ups and downs, but the goal is to maintain a trendline moving up and to the right over the duration of one’s life. Everything is an opportunity for growth. Nothing is permanent.

And that last bit - the lack of permanence and recognition that everything is in a persistent state of change - is what leaves me confounded. He’s a smart guy and a savvy operator. He must see that the B1G is changing radically, our rivals are changing radically, what is being asked from fans is changing radically. But he’s not changing anything.

This too shall pass: not special teams, friendo. Solid field goal team, interspersed with some of the most diseased mistakes imaginable. Changes to personnel and coaching? Absolutely not.

This too shall pass: sclerotic offense that disappears for huge stretches of games? Not so much. We’re on year three and our third offense coordinator for that turgid mess. The only consistent part of all of your bad relationships is you and I reckon that applies to Fleck and his offensive coordinators as well.

This too shall pass: Tresselball? Nah, that is as permanent as death, taxes, and the eventual heat death of the universe. We ought to follow Brew’s example of “Pound the Rock” and have “Drain the Clock” banners hung up around the athletic complex.

I’m being a bit of a dick here to make a point. I like what Fleck has done for the program and under no circumstances am I prepared to move on from him. But, man, the world is changing and if he doesn’t adapt, we’re cooked and he’s going to find it tough to get another P5 gig. His approach lets us whip the teams that are our peers or worse eight times out of ten, but, as Saturday demonstrated, it isn’t foolproof.

His approach on offense and special teams gives us zero margin for error. When opportunities present themselves to get an extra possession or ice the game he will choose the least risky option 100 times out of 100. And, credit to him, we’ve won a bunch of games that way. Some of that is a function of schedule, but I’m not taking anything away from his record. Looking at the 2024 schedule though, we might be dogs in every B1G game. Have we seen anything this year to give us hope of upsetting anyone? I’m hard pressed to even remember when the last real upset was. It could be that we’re just not designed to compete with teams that are better than us. And that’ll be bad news as long as we stay in the B1G.

It's just immensely frustrating that someone who preaches about the importance of change in one’s life, who is so forward thinking in terms of engaging with recruits and players on their level, and goes so far as to mark his body up as a permanent reminder of the need to adapt, is either unable or unwilling to see that what has worked for him in the past will not work for him in the future. He has unlimited latitude to run whatever scheme he wants at Minnesota and he’s using that latitude to do approximately nothing in the face of monumental changes to the game. It’s enough to make my teeth hurt.

Pretzel Logic

2023-10-26T00:27:00.004-05:00

It’s been a fun week in Gopher fandom. Every day the Michigan message boards creep towards clarity. Michigan State’s athletics department capped off an impressive run of incompetence that started in 2018 by putting an Austrian on their jumbotron. Rutgers is bowl eligible. Oh, and Minnesota beat Iowa.

Douglas Fir and Frothy Gopher have already put on their NBC gear to explore the Chernobylization of the Iowa fanbase. Personally, I was so sure that the curse would not be broken this year that I bailed at halftime to enjoy one of the last 60 degree Minnesota days of 2023 to pheasant hunt with my father-in-law. As the sun met the horizon in Lincoln County, MN I was pushing through a stand of 5 foot tall prairie grass when I regained cell service and got the news. Our small hunting party cheered and the bird dogs howled. No, I didn’t get any pheasants. Yes, it feels amazing to have been wrong.

His tearful, euphoric release demonstrated the extreme emotional toll the 0-7 Iowa streak had on P.J. Fleck. For the fans it ran at least as deep; when Minnesota last won in Iowa City in 1999, I was a senior in high school. The only current undergrads who were even alive then either did military service, an extended mission trip, or are bored 80 year old grandparents checking one last thing off the list before shuffling off this mortal coil.

The impact of such an emotional event was in my mind somewhere around my 10^th replay of the second half later that night. A combination of physical wear, mental weakness, and Brau Brothers beer allowed the concept of a “let down” or “trap game” to creep into my mind. How would the tension, relief, and celebration affect our coaches and players? Is there enough time to refocus and reset or will we look past a beaten-down but still-breathing Michigan State team in coming apart at the seams?

It is Year 7 of the Fleck regime at Minnesota, more than sufficient sample size to provide indicating trends. Let us look back to look forward. In my view, since 2017 there have been 4 games that carried a similar level of emotional weight and practical tension as last weekend. Let’s tackle them in order.

November 24^th, 2018: Minnesota 37, Wisconsin 15 at Camp Randall Stadium

2018 was a tumultuous year; Fleck’s second, the Minnesota defense was shameful. Under Robb Smith Minnesota gave up 42 points against a 5-7 Maryland, 53 points in Fleck’s only loss to date against Nebraska, and 55 points in a debacle against Illinois that led to Smith’s dismissal. Replacement Joe Rossi led an immediate turnaround holding Purdue to 10 points and eventual Big Ten West champs Northwestern to 24 before 5-6 Minnesota came into 6-5 Wisconsin in Madison. Minnesota’s last win in Madison had been in 1994, a stretch of 24 years (spoiler alert: relevant).

Minnesota led 17-7 at halftime; Joe Rossi’s defense held splendidly and a season that saw the introduction of both Tanner Morgan and Mohammed Ibrahim was capped with a dominating victory, salvaging Minnesota’s once-dead bowl hopes. I’ll never forget watching the rush to The Axe and players chopping down someone else’s goalposts for once. P.J. Fleck looking adoringly at The Axe has become an iconic image for Gopher fans and apparently also for his linens. I stayed up until about 4 am that night watching replays and listening to the greatest ever episode of TAWpod (RIP in Peace).

Postscript: Minnesota sent Paul Johnson to retirement in fine form, handily defeating Georgia Tech in the Quick Lane Bowl 34-10. A full month elapsed between the games, for parties to be had and nerves to settle.

November 9^th, 2019: #17 Minnesota 31, #4 Penn State 26 at TCF Bank Stadium

What started as a terrifying season way-too-close non-conference wins settled into a firm upswing by mid-season as Minnesota, 8-0 for the first time since The War (the second one) welcomed Penn State to Minneapolis in front of the most energetic, wired crowd I can recall bar one. The energy on campus was electric and palpable, unlike any other pregame experience I’ve had on campus. “Gophs by a million!” was MVofDT/MVofBOT’s confident pregame prediction and I had almost come to believe it until Penn State’s final drive. Then Jordan Howden intervened and sealed the victory.

What followed was a (positive) media storm unprecedented for a Gopher coach in the modern era. After the field had been stormed, P.J. Fleck spent the next week doing near-constant media hits in every possible medium. By mid-week even Mr. Energetic was looking droopy-eyed and exhausted on ESPN. But surely, he wouldn’t fumble this opportunity to beat a vulnerable 6-3 Iowa the following week; Minnesota was now 9-0 for the first time since the Roosevelt Administration (the first one). Opportunity and history awaited.

Postscript: #8 Minnesota came into Iowa City and laid a massive egg, losing 23-19 in a contest where they were never completely out but never looked completely prepared. There was a dropped touchdown pass in the endzone that probably didn’t have anything to do with preparation, but Kirk Ferentz had the last smirk and Fleck went to 0-4 all-time against Iowa.

November 27, 2021: Minnesota 23, #14 Wisconsin 13 at TCF Bank Stadium

2021 continued the pattern of 2019 with Minnesota frequently playing to the level of their opponent. Conservative, show-no-secrets, clock management offense led to upset losses to Bowling Green State and Illinois. Mixed with respectable losses to Ohio State and Iowa, 7-4 Minnesota’s season looked much less impressive than 8-3 Wisconsin’s despite their similar records. All of Wisconsin’s losses had come to AP-ranked teams: Penn State, Notre Dame, and Michigan.

Minnesota went into the half down 10-6 and I remember feeling pretty ok about that at the time. The floodgates opened in the 3^rd Quarter, and with night fallen, Minnesota rushed the field to the dulcet tones of “Jump Around”, and that’s the first time I saw an opposing fan physically seethe.

Postscript: Minnesota won the Guaranteed Rate Bowl against West Virginia 18-6 on a nightmare turf that claimed several Mountaineer knees. The game itself was work-a-day and unremarkable. Minnesota went out and did its job, nothing flashy, the game never really in doubt, again benefitting from a month’s break.

November 26, 2022: Minnesota 23, Wisconsin 16 at Camp Randall Stadium

Listen, we all remember this one. Wisconsin looked bad in 2022; the offense had lost it’s last drops of juice and on October 2^nd the Badgers sent Paul Chryst packing to the nearest Kohls for a new pair of khakis. Defensive savant Jim Leonhard stood in as interim head coach. Did he know Luke Fickell would be named head coach the next day? Who the hell cares, because Minnesota reversed the previous year’s pattern, going into halftime up 10-6 but winning the second half 13-10 to hold on for a win. It was the first time Minnesota had won back-to-back against Wisconsin since 1993-1994 and the first time back-to-back in Madison since 1984/1986.

Postscript: Minnesota defeated Syracuse in the Pinstripe Bowl with 14 points each in the 2^nd and 3^rd Quarter. Yet again, a month’s cooldown helped.

October 28^th, 2023: Minnesota vs. Michigan State, Huntington Bank Stadium

So what does history tell us about this game? Frankly, the precedents as discussed above are of limited value. Three occurred against Wisconsin and at the end of the season with a month off for leisurely celebration and refocus. In each case, P.J. Fleck and his staff did their jobs well and the team was ready to win.

It is tempting to focus on 2019 Penn State as the only real comparator. It occurred in the regular season, with the letdown occurring only 7 days later. For us middle-aged fans, it helped exorcise the demon of 2003 Michigan, further pumping up our expectations going into Iowa the next week.

Dear reader, I am not going to break down the football Xs and Os, this is a purely vibes-based post. We all know that history doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. I argue that this year is a slant rhyme with 2018. In 2018 we finally defeated Wisconsin in Madison for the first time in 24 years. In 2023 we defeated Iowa in Iowa City after 24 years. Our defense has been embarrassing but appears to be improving. It is possible our best running backs will be out; in 2018 we had lost Zack Annexstad and handed the QB role to redshirt freshman Tanner Morgan.

Unlike 2019, our post-script opponent is not a hated rival but rather mildly annoying and adrift. Michigan State is losing players to the portal and to half-game suspensions, Mel Tucker has time on his hands, and somehow NFTuck remains a going concern. P.J. Fleck has made his media appearances but the conversion of the Iowa fanbase into the QAnon of the Big Ten West has limited demands and exposure. The team practiced Sunday night, shifting immediately into Michigan State season.

Friends, Gophers, the past can be a useful measuring stick, a guide that shows us what is possible and the traps that may befall us. It is not a sentence, not fate, not destiny. This weekend we will go the 2018 route and give Sparty a firm no.

Postcript: Gophs by several hundred thousand.

PJ Fleck and the Breaking of a Fan Base

2023-10-25T13:46:00.000-05:00

I really hate Wisconsin. Like, an every-fiber-of-my being, diagnosable personality disorder level of hate. I get triggered when I see a Wisconsin license plate. I refuse to be anything more than minimally-friendly acquaintances with anyone who has ever supported that team. I won’t even accept a LinkedIn invite from a UWi grad, because fuck you. It’s pathological, really unhealthy, and mostly survived intact from what was otherwise a wholesale teardown of my thought patterns and coping mechanisms.

I’m mature enough to admit they broke me. Absolutely and totally. I simply couldn’t tolerate losing to our most-hated rival for over a decade, watching them win* the B1G, go to Rose Bowls, and get talked about as playoff contenders. Replace the running backs, quarterbacks, defensive coordinators, head coaches, walk-on linebackers from Minnesota, and our damned stadium and the results were still the same. We lose and I sink further into psychosis.

Beating them the last few seasons helped a lot. There’s a certain catharsis that comes only from beating your nemesis. The pressure and weight of constant failure felt somewhere between one’s heart and one’s stomach is gone, and that is a major quality of life enhancement. But I’d be untruthful if I said it cured me. The onus of failure is gone, but the insecurity, inferiority, and jealousy are like some sort of black mold festering in my spirit: you can’t necessarily see it, but, damn, it’s hard to breathe and why is it so damp in here?

This is mostly where Nebraska fans are. Now, they’d never admit it; that would require some acceptance of reality and disposal of their Tom Osbourne-signed Starter jackets. But you lose five straight to Minnesota – MINNESOTA! – and something changes in you. Couple that with Scott Frost’s celebrated return ending as if MacArthur had attempted to retake the Philippines aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald during the gales of November, and you’ve got a tragically broken fan base. I take no joy in this.

I do, though, because seeing how we’ve decimated the spirit of another fan base is better than any drug on earth. They obsess over Minnesota. Gopher football tweets anything, you can count on seeing a half dozen reply guys with a skull and bones or Memorial Stadium avatars in the mentions. This summer, a bunch of them mysteriously had early knowledge of the AJ Perez piece and were publicly wishcasting Fleck’s termination. Any weird news comes out about Fleck – which, you know, isn’t not often – and they descend on the quote tweets like locusts in a corn field. And I think that’s what’s at the heart of this. It’s not so much losing to Minnesota that broke them. They can’t stand losing to Fleck.

I mean, think about it: he’s this extremely weird little man loaded with more catch phrases than Tony Robbins, wearing capri pants, and having cosmetic surgery to (allegedly) make his eyes wider. He eschews the image of traditional masculinity, doesn’t speak with a southern drawl, probably smells better than your wife, and wholly lives life on his own terms. If you grew up idolizing Tom Osbourne as the epitome of what a college FOOT-ball coach should be, Fleck is anathema. He’s a used car salesman only interested in himself, constantly looking to move up and out of Minnesota, who also probably tagged his wife next to the trophy representing a 100-plus year old college football rivalry. And this guy, this elfin apostate to all that is good and true about the most important thing in your life owns your team. Which takes us to the Iowa game a few days ago.

Fleck has most definitely not owned Iowa. As discussed on the one, and so far only episode of the SGH Podcast, Ferentz has owned Fleck. Thanks to many, many low-probability events – Tyler Johnson dropping a TD pass in 2019, Mo fumbling in 2022, numerous 80+ yard passes to TEs who were never heard from again – Fleck came into last Saturday on an 0-7 run against the Ferentz Dynasty. Iowa fans had never had to contemplate the notion of being emasculated by big talky Mr. Fancy Loafers. He was an amusing annoyance who the rugged, windswept, stoic man of the people Kirk Ferentz put into his place in an annual rite of passage to winter. And then Saturday happened.

Look, I understand why Iowa fans think they got screwed. It’s a rule that isn’t enforced consistently or very often. CDJ is a dynamic player and they want him to be celebrated for making a great play. They thought they won the game and it was all taken away from them by what they believe was an arbitrary decision from some pencil pusher behind a TV screen. Having experienced dozens of similar low-probability events as a Gopher fan, I can absolutely empathize with them; I know how it feels to get jobbed by the refs and steal defeat from the jaws of victory. That ability to empathize and really understand the depths of that despondency, to viscerally feel the pressure of the void residing in their souls since last Saturday evening, that’s what makes this so much better than nuking them from orbit and winning by 50.

The response online has been so much better than I ever could have hoped for. Due to illiteracy, cognitive dissonance, or huffing leaded gasoline, Iowa fans and their enablers have been unable to comprehend what happened, why this happened to them, and that there’s no appeal process. We’ve seen Zapruder film level breakdowns measuring the angle of CDJ’s arm relative to the orbital plane of Mercury, rules and rational thinking savants Pat McAfee and Aaron Rodgers caring about their feelings more than facts, and Twitter reply guys screeching into the wind so hard that even the most ardent Husker fan would blush. It’s truly transcendent stuff.

But hoo wee, the Iowa fan vitriol directed Fleck is coming straight from a 4chan API. Absolutely unhinged. Tearing up at the end of the game, he’s a total fraud. Hugging his players walking Floyd to the locker room, you should hear about his first wife. Guy takes a moment to video call his wife from midfield at the stadium of what had been his nemesis and you’d think he put Hitler on the Kinnick scoreboard. The way they lost was bad. The way they lost to him was more than their brains could handle.

This game will hurt Iowa fans for a while. They’ll remember the frustration in getting screwed by the refs, having a moment of unadulterated joy be removed from existence. That’ll sting for a bit. But that impotent rage they felt when Fleck celebrated on the sidelines, when he stood alone at midfield at Kinnick, when he said there was nothing controversial about that call. Buddy, that is going to eat at their souls for a generation. Congrats to Fleck for breaking his second fan base.

Overcoming the Seethe: A Helpful Guide for Iwoa Fans

2023-10-24T13:30:00.001-05:00

Hello All,

I’m Douglas Fir. Like many of you I watched the University of Minnesota defeat the University of Iowa in a football game on Saturday by the score of 12-10. It was an exciting, extremely B1G West game that came down to the second-to-last possession. Before that fateful possession (in which the Iowa offense, needing just 20 yads to win the game went sack/throw to nobody/throw to somebody in a pretty gold helmet), there was a punt. And on that punt, there was an infraction.

Despite the B1G and NCAA taking time out of their busy day (looking at you, Michigan) to patiently explain to the people that the call on said infraction was correct, there seem to be a lot of objections. I am no great football mind, but I do have the ability to listen and learn, and in my real life, I am essentially a paid researcher and explainer. So, I am taking time out of my busy day (playing Civ VI while listening to Spoon) to put together a Frequently Asked Questions style explainer. Except you aren’t “just asking questions” (unless it’s about a certain ref, see below), you are shouting objections. So, please enjoy my Frequently Shouted Objections (FSOs), with explanations. Or don’t. I don’t care, my team won Floyd.

FSOs

1) Cooper DeJean (CDJ) didn’t signal fair catch!!!

a. Correct, that’s why it wasn’t called a fair catch.

2) So what was called then?!

a. Invalid Signal. It’s a rule put in place to protect the ball carrier and to not allow punt returners to bait the kicking team into giving up on the play. There’s a whole rulebook entry and everything, you can look it up or you can look up the Des Moines Register article I took this info from. I googled “Des Moines Punt”.

Basically you can’t wave your arm, even below your shoulder.

3) That’s not even a penalty!

a. Correct again! That’s why Iowa wasn’t assessed penalty yardage. But, it does kill the play.

4) But he was just waving his arm for balance!!!

a. CDJ is one of the most athletically gifted players to ever set foot on the turf at Kinnick. I’ve watched that young man play for several years, he is a marvel. He does not run like a toddler trying to escape from a grasshopper that landed near him.

5) If it IS a penalty, why weren’t the Gophers called for a late hit!?

a. As an often-frustrated viewer of Gopher Football, I wish to god our special teams was capable of hitting him. But they weren’t. That’s how he scored the touchdown, you see.

6) So why didn't the Gophers stop? They tried to tackle CDJ!!

a. As mentioned above, they failed. And, as all of us who played 2 minutes of any sport know, you play through the whistle. The Gophers tried to tackle CDJ because the refs didn’t tell them to stop. Iowa did the same thing, a mark of a well-coached team.

7) Well, if it is an infraction, its arbitrary!!

a. It’s actually not! It’s a call designed to take the arbitrary away, and it did! We would be arguing for (more) years if the immediate “you wave your arm, its dead” call didn’t exist. The review would have taken hours, as referees called in mathematicians from Pittsburgh to determine the angle of CDJ’s shoulder. We would have had sports psychiatrists examining the complex emotions of 18-22 year olds, trying to determine if any of the 11 Gophers gave up on the play. What even is “giving up”?

8) So why is it never called?

a. It is, you just forgot cause we all watch a lot of football. It was called in 2015 against Wisconsin, you were probably watching and laughing. I bet you even tried to explain to your bored partner why they called it. It was called against the Gophers THIS YEAR against EMU. If you think CDJ’s hand wave is minor, wait till you see that one! And our guy might even be able to make the toddler-running argument (he is very small)!

9) Well, it violates the “Spirit of the Rule”!!

a. OK, first of all, that sounds like a boat a dictator would own. Like if someone told you that Peron ordered the Dirty War from a superyacht called “the Spirit of Rule”, you wouldn’t even question it. Hell, I’d believe it if you told me that Chris Doyle owned a Sea-Doo named that. Basically, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, the rule is the rule, and that’s also its spirit.

10) They can’t even review that!

a. They can (and should) if the guy almost runs out of bounds. (see point 18)

11) It’s not even what the review was for!

a. Doesn’t matter. Has never mattered. If you think that sucks, welcome to the party, the guest list is every sports fan.

12) OK, let’s say CDJ does the same thing, but he fumbles and the Gophers recover, I bet it’s not reviewed then!

a. I think it is? Would be a turnover play and I’m pretty sure those are always reviewed. Also, historical fiction is best left to Robert Harris.

13) OK, let’s say that CDJ is tackled on the 2, I bet it’s not reviewed then!!

a. If he almost ran out of bounds in this fake play you made up, it would be. Seriously, Fatherland is a pretty interesting read. And he has more!

14) Well I’ll wait until I hear from the league office!

a. See I actually thought this was in play, like I said I am no great football mind and I’ve been wrong before. Boy, was I wrong about being wrong (and I am a big enough man to own that accidental correctness). Actually, they issued a…non apology? Reassertment? A Doubling-down? I’m not sure what you’d call it but they came out today (Monday) and said “not only did we get it right, here’s why” (see Point 2).

15) But they told Kirk Ferentz it was a fair catch on the field!!

a. I think a couple things are possible here. One is he misheard. Another, he chose to mishear (I cannot tell you how many people I’ve interacted with that still think point 1 is true). Third, it’s better to accuse the ref of lying (no penalty for him at all) than to accept that it was a mistake, a dead play, and his son’s offense moved the ball 12 YARDS (36 feet, 10.973 meters) in the second half of a rivalry game.

16) I watched the clip, and it doesn’t even seem like PJ Fleck thought it was a penalty!!!

a. Oh, if PJ Fleck thought it was a penalty you’d be good with it? Yeah? That’s how we decide penalties in Iowa City now, a man in capris you call “Phillip” gets to decide?

17) The ref blew a call in a MAC/Big 12 game seven years ago, and we are supposed to trust this guy?!

a. You got fired from a job in your 20s, how can I trust you?

18) The ref blew a call in the Iowa-Minnesota game last year and we are supposed to trust this guy!?!? And he is from NEBRASKA!?! A little FISHY?!?! JUST ASKING QUESTIONS HERE!!!!!

a. This is actually one of my favorites, because I am lazy and you already answered this one yourself! He DID mess up a call in the biggest play in the IA-MN game last year. For those that don’t remember, Iowa LB Jack Campbell picked off a tipped pass, raced to his right, hugged the sideline, cut back across to his left and scored what appeared to be the game-winning touchdown (I remember because I will never forget). Except he didn’t, because the ref said he stepped out AND BLEW THE PLAY DEAD! That’s a really big mistake, and one that made the result of the rest of the play non-reviewable! You (Iowa fans) were really upset that he blew the play dead from the moment that play happened until Saturday at like 6:30 pm when you suddenly became big “blow the play dead or it’s cheating” advocates. This time he didn’t blow the play dead, the review got the call right (See point 14). Also, lots of people are FROM Nebraska. Nebraska isn’t a place you end up in, it’s a place you leave.

19) They told Kirk in a meeting before a game that CDJ could do that!

a. They told him he could do what, exactly? They told him he could ran naturally like a toddler? They told him he could make an invalid fair catch signal? Or they spoke briefly about how he likes to signal fair catch and they moved on. Latter seems likely.

20) They stole this moment from the fans!

a. Nobody stole anything from anyone. You paid your money for 60 minutes of football, they played them. If it makes you feel better, the play never even happened. It was always dead, they just didn’t realize it yet.

21) They stole this moment from CDJ!!!

a. I feel bad for CDJ, I do. I have a ton of respect for him, and I wish NBC would have shown us anything other than his sad face for 20 minutes. But he did the thing. He rolled through the stop sign, and even though he’s done it before he got caught this time. And it happened at the worst time. He wasn’t going to Kum and Go (Iowa reference), he was going to his wedding. And maybe the cop right there missed it and his boss behind him caught it so it feels even more unfair. And it made him late, and it was embarrassing, and you feel for the guy because maybe he didn’t even do it on purpose. But he did the thing, he broke the rule. It’s on tape and everything (IDK some sort of stop sign camera, stick with the analogy).

22) Well, I still don’t feel like this was fair!

a. Hey, been there boss. It gets better. Go beat Nebraska in a few weeks, that will get you through the long summer. Always works for me. Also, now you can tell yourself that it wasn’t fair, which is a super easy and fun way to cope.

Hope this helped.

-Doug

NIL and the Minnesota Psyche

2023-09-29T14:47:00.000-05:00

Darius Taylor is pretty good, yeah? Hoo wee, watching him mash the [REDACTED] player at the line of scrimmage, then taking it outside to break that long tuddy in [REDACTED] was about as close as it gets to meeting god in this plane of existence. I love Mo like he is my only son, but he was never able to break those big touchdown runs. Destroy your soul at the point of contact and charge 20 yards downfield on 3^rd and 14, absolutely; but he just never had the speed to outrun the defensive backfield. Darius, as a true freshman, looks like the sort of dude who will not only steal your lunch money, he’ll also swing over and burn down your house after school. Absolute effing killer. The best parts of MBIII and Maroney.

Naturally, the proud representatives of the Gopher innernetz are ecstatic, crowing about how we’ve got a future Heisman contender, lording our successful recruitment of him over other suitors such as Michigan and Wisconsin, and generally throwing deuces to the rest of the college football world in recognition we might have the best running back in the nation in maroon and gold. A little over the top? Maybe. But we’re savvy enough to know when we’ve got something special and are not afraid to let other people know in the most condescending possible ways.

Ah, no. Alas. That is not, in fact, how most of us are handling this. In the true spirit of the Minnesota state motto of “OMG WE’RE SO FUCKED” we are managing Darius’ success with the dignity and aplomb of an exploding whale carcass. Simply enjoying good things as good while they are happening while taking steps to ensure the good things keep being good is not in our DNA. We must construct the worst possible future outcome, do approximately nothing to keep it from manifesting into reality, and shriek the whole time about the injustice of it all.

And that, friends, is the current state of dialogue on the Gophers’ NIL situation.

A sampling of the prevailing thinking: “Why isn’t Dinkytown Athletes getting Target to use Gophers in their advertising?” “It’s not fair that fans have to pay for player salaries!” “We’ll never be able to raise enough money to keep Darius and we’re doomed!” A fine slurry of intellectual pap, to be sure. But, having assembled our Strawman of Despair, let’s set it on fire!

*Because people will stick a shiv between my ribs tomorrow if I don’t say this: you are free to spend your money however you see fit. None of what I am about to say is directed at people who don’t have disposable income.

1) Why isn’t Dinkytown Athletes getting Target to use Gophers in their advertising?

First, yeah, the people who are running DTA are well networked and have, with 100% certainty, approached Minnesota’s collection of Fortune 500 companies to gauge their interest in NIL participation. Give them some credit for being competent businesspeople. Second, to believe that Fortune 500 companies are going to be all hot and bothered to use college kids in their advertising reflects a complete disconnect from reality. These firms are operating on a national level, not cutting ads on a state-by-state basis to get Darius in for Minneapolis spots and Braelon Allen in for Steven Avery in Manitowoc County Jail. You need a national star to feature in national advertisements. At the collegiate level, that’s basically Caleb Williams, Caitlin Clark and…that’s about it. Hell, even for NFL players, getting on Fortune 500 spots requires absolute superstardom. For our favorite pro team, the Vikings, that’s Justin Jefferson and /squints/ mayyyybe Kirko Chainz? There are a few other Vikings that you’ll see on billboards for local companies, but they are very, very much the exceptions. If Fortune 500 and smaller regional firms aren’t banging down the doors to get NFL players into their advertising campaigns, I’m not sure why you would expect they’d do differently for our favorite rodential players.

2) “It’s not fair that fans have to pay for player salaries!”

You’re right. It isn’t. That college football teams bring in tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and it is somehow the burden of the fans to provide player compensation is the height of idiocy. It is, as the kids used to say, a feature of late-stage capitalism. Having acknowledged that it is, indeed, extremely not fair, you have three choices: nope out and find a new hobby; indulge yourself in the unfairness of it all, do nothing, hope there are enough other people willing to pay your share, and, if there aren’t, scream about your prescience when the team is horribad; or buck up, realize life isn’t fair and that we all need to do our part to compete in this new reality. DTA can’t move mountains on their own. If we want the team to be competitive, it is literally up to us to make that happen.

I get it, though. There is a principle here that the onus shouldn’t be on us to make this work. And it sucks, because it really shouldn’t be. But I’m not sure I would feel great standing on principle as I watch the team get dismantled week after week in perpetuity. I’ll give what I can, risk throwing good money after bad, hope others are willing to do the same and, if it doesn’t help, I can die knowing I did my best to help something I deeply care about.

3) “We’ll never be able to raise enough money to keep Darius and we’re doomed!”

If Alex Trebek were still with us, I would ask him “What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?” and win the Daily Double. If we collectively believe that we can’t raise enough to keep Darius, then we absolutely will not raise enough money to keep Darius. The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club. Yes, Bucky Irving left for a grip of bills to play at Oregon. Everyone knows this. You do not need to keep telling people that happened. You’ll note, though, that Darius Taylor is not, as of last reading, Bucky Irving. Different person. Different circumstances. One has no bearing on the other as much as our brains want to make that connection.

Fleck’s decision in not offering recruits NIL is brilliant here, in that it recognizes if monetary opportunities are the primary motivator for a recruit, it ain’t going to work here. We will never have the biggest NIL war chest and, according to Fleck, he doesn’t even want the biggest NIL war chest. He wants enough to keep our players here. How much is that? No idea. More than we have today, but a lot less than what Texas A&M can raise.

Will Darius get massive NIL opportunities to play elsewhere? I mean, yeah, if he stays healthy, he will. But NIL was not the primary factor in his decision to commit here, as he was offered more elsewhere during his recruitment. Read that again and repeat it to yourself every time your brain starts screaming at you. He’s already getting something and, based on Fleck’s AAA team appeal and on the emails I’m getting, it’s all hands on deck to raise more so we can keep him. Yes, of course it’s possible his priorities have changed and he is now purely motivated by money; but that gets back to the Minnesota state motto and assuming the worst possible future even when the contrary outcome has real evidence to support it. If you believe there’s no chance we keep him because we can’t come up with the money and you do nothing to help mitigate that risk, I guess I’m not sure why its worth following the team except to hate watch it. Free country, though, brother.

Straw man = dead. Look, I recognize it’s a challenging issue. It’s fundamentally changing the nature of a sport many of us grew up obsessing over and, a lot of times, it feels like it’s being ruined by money. And it just feels wrong when, now, we have to spend more money to fix it for our team. But every other teams’ fan bases are carrying that burden for their teams and, if we don’t carry it for ours, we’re stuck with the burden of creating a broken team. A Sophie’s choice of burdens, to be sure. But, man, we’ve got to try, don’t we?

Same Old Gophers

2023-09-28T15:54:00.000-05:00

Same old Gophers, right?

I don’t know how long I’ve been on the Gopher boards – probably 15 years or so – but this week has been one of the most depressing. It may be the most depressing, recognizing there’s a lot of recency bias at play. Fleck has peaked, our OC/QB coach is an unmitigated disaster, our QB can’t pass gas, our superstar true-freshman running back is alternatively/both having the treads worn off of his tires and likely to leave for USC for one billion dollars in the offseason, and we’re never going to be able to compete in the new CFB world so we may as well accept our fate and start cheering for our MIAC schools of choice.

Such are message board narratives in the world of Gopher sports. What strikes me is how comfortably everyone slides back into old thought patters of “ah, shit, here we go again.” That we’re in the midst of the best Gopher football run in the last 60 years is immediately cast aside when we experience an event that reminds us of our collective trauma on October 10^th, 2003. The despair sets in, shields go up, we burn any optimism with hellfire, and begin the rites of eating our young.

Last year I wrote about my experiences with a brain that is pretty rad most of the time, but, when left to its own devices, is like turning a relativistic jet on my mental and physical health. I found the healthiest thing for me is to – at least a little - separate my personal identity from the performance of Gopher sports: I am not shit because Gopher football is shit.

That’s served me really well for the last four years; but, frankly it’s never been pressure tested because we’ve been really good! Sure, we’ve had some stinkers, but nothing that felt like October 10, 2003. During the 4^th quarter on Saturday, I felt that fist of rats beginning to consume me from the inside. I recall two things from when that sensation hit: “aw, shit, here we go again” and “oh, hello, old friend.” There’s a recognition that the demons persist with a brain that still has a tendency make negative associations with things that are not inherently associated and…a comfort that the old ruts still take the wheels?

For those of us who have been around since, say, the early 90s (and certainly those who remember the 70s and 80s), we experienced a lot more pain than joy. There was the odd game or two; but the years, they were lean. And the calluses, they grew thick. While there was hope – there is always hope – there was this tacit, collective recognition that disaster was inevitable. Any time something good happened, we could be sure fate would manifest lawn darts from the ether to pierce our eyes for the next three seasons. We went through the seasons with a perpetual smiling wince, trying to enjoy the moment but encumbered by the damage of the past and what it would inexplicably portend for the future.

On October 9^th, 2003 we, for the first time for my generation of fans, no longer bore that burden. We had hit the bottom and were now claiming rights to respectability and what lay beyond. We could go toe to toe with Iowa and Wisconsin and, at the least, punch the helmet schools in the face a few times before losing. And for the first three quarters of the game on October 10^th, we knew that things were different, better. The proof was on the field. It was all the evidence we needed and, to quote Coack Fleck, we were never going back.

Then, Same old Gophers.

That the wound from that game still festers is evident following Saturday’s loss to Northwestern. But the speed with which the narrative spun to tropes of hopelessness, that we would be unable to effectively compete in the new CFB world, that Fortune 500 companies were wronging us by not contributing to NIL, that Fleck needed to change or should be replaced was shocking. Good teams (which I don’t think we are this season, fwiw) lose to bad programs sometimes. Good programs have bad years sometimes. But we went from cautious optimism to apocalyptic despair in the course of two minutes of game time. That says something about us. There is safety and comfort in not believing we can accomplish great things. Without the hope, we can’t be hurt. Same old Gophers is a barrier against the blinding lawn darts of fate.

There’s a hypothesis that suggests depression and anxiety are problems of attention. Essentially, people with those maladies are more inclined to pay attention to and fixate on thoughts that are negative or induce a stress reaction. Everyone has negative or stress-inducing thoughts, but most people just ignore them; those with depression and anxiety obsess over them. While the fixation is an active process – it requires effort on the part of the thinker to think about something – the person fixating doesn’t know they are engaged in maladaptive behavior because they don’t have the benefit of knowing anything differently. The only subjective experience they’ve had is their own. Consequently, diverting attention away from the negative thoughts becomes an exercise in awareness that one need not actively engage with those thoughts. There is a choice to divert attention elsewhere. It’s easier said than done, but that’s the idea.

I think the protection we get from Same old Gophers is a helpful tool to manage disappointment in the short term. It’s a way to commiserate with like-minded people around a set of shared experiences or rage against those with a sliver of optimism. It’s a glass of booze after a hard day at work. But, if applied as a constant state, it becomes a problem of attention. It focuses on a few data points while ignoring a host of others: the full student sections we’ve had for the last few years; the Millennial and Gen-Z engagement at Dinkytown Athletes events; the players we’ve put into the NFL recently; that we now are generating NIL funds by selling beer and vodka. These are things that will potentially pay dividends for a generation, irrespective of who our coach is.

Depression and anxiety are challenging conditions to overcome. Speaking from experience, I have a lot more good days than bad; but the bad days still really fucking suck. I think Same old Gophers is a far less intractable state of being. We can choose to fixate on Saturday, draw a line from 20 years ago to today, and probably convince ourselves that our window is closed and hope is lost. It’s safe. It’s comfortable. But it’s a choice we don’t have to make. We don’t have to be the same old Gophers.

Not very bright guys and things got out of hand

2023-07-28T15:59:00.005-05:00

Yo. Been awhile. Let’s get weird.

So, you’re all certainly aware of the ~~Jason Stahl~~ AJ Perez piece(s) in Front Office Sports on the culture of Minnesota’s football program under Fleck. Just to get this out of the way: I don’t want bad shit happening in the program. Bad shit should be investigated. I don’t know what the threshold for investigation should be; but I’ve seen nothing in ~~Stahl’s~~ Perez’s reporting to suggest there’s a need for a broader, third-party investigation. If more details come to light, then I reserve the right to change my mind.

The whole thing is just extremely odd to me. Of all the programs to go after, why Minnesota? Fleck is an oddball, sure, but that’s not new. He was an oddball at Western Michigan and his unconventional approach was covered widely both nationally and locally when he was hired here. And while we’ve been on something of an upswing for the last five years, it’s not as if we’ve burst onto the national scene and are vying for national championships. We’re a slightly-above-average Power-5 program looking for a special season every few years. Much better than where we were 15 years ago, but not exactly the status that brings investigative journalists based in northern Virginia sniffing around to figure out how we achieved so much so fast.

The other odd element here is that a few Nebraska fans were, apparently, aware of this story before it was published. Now, yeah, it’s possible some Nubbers are super well connected to Perez and he was leaking some of the details; but we’re not talking about those sorts of Husker fans. The ones that knew are the type that live in the dank, sweaty, scrotal folds of the internet and have no room for independent thought in what can generously be referred to as their minds: PJ Fleck is a greedy slumlord in the blighted neighborhood that is Nebraska brains.

We had some laughs wondering whether the piece was, perhaps, funded by some wealthy Husker boosters to potentially get Fleck fired prior to the season opener, thus destabilizing the program enough to give Matt Ruhle a win in his first conference game, setting off a giant Will Compton bukkake. But, sadly, I don’t think that’s the case. Guess we’ll have to take comfort in whipping that ass on the field again this season.

No, I think Perez got sold some vaporware from our old friend Jason Stahl, ran with it, is now stuck reporting on a turd, and is balls deep confirmation bias such that he doesn’t know up from down. The Nubbers are only relevant insofar as they’ve had a chub for Stahl ever since his attempted takedown of Fleck a few years back. Safe to assume some of them have kept in touch in the - again, weirdly-obsessive – hope for another shot at deposing Fleck.

I, an idiot, and most assuredly not an investigative journalist of AJ Perez’s caliber, present you with the following set of facts:

1. [OCTOBER 2020]: Stahl is a former adjunct professor at the U. He claims he was fired for reporting on an abusive culture at the U: https://twitter.com/JasonStahl__/status/1316493260362313729

2. [OCTOBER 2020]: He wrote a big thing on it, WCCO covered it for reasons, it got play for a few days, Badger and Husker fans heavily petted themselves to it, still probably do, there was nothing to it, the story died: link to his Substack is in the Twitter link above. I’m not giving him hits, but you’re welcome to find it on your own

3. [NOVEMBER 2020]: Capitalizing on this ~~success~~ event, he founded the College Football Players Association (CFPA), an org built ostensibly to be a union for college football players akin to the NFLPA: https://www.cfbpa.org/about

4. [NOVEMBER 2020]: Former University of Minnesota Regent, noted Fleck/U admin antagonist, and self-described thought leader, Michael Hsu, joins the CFPA advisory board:

SEASONS CHANGE. TIME PASSES BY. There were probably relevant things that happened here, but your boy is lay-zee

5. [JUNE 2023]: Stahl appears in…Front Office Sports representing the CFPA on issues related to player licensing for the upcoming reboot of EA’s college football game: https://frontofficesports.com/ea-college-football-and-the-problem-with-group-licensing-in-college-athletics/

6. [JUNE 2023] Stahl appears in…Front Office Sports a week later, again on the issue of NIL licensing: https://frontofficesports.com/brandr-group-raises-concerns-with-ea-college-football-nil-deal/

7. [JULY 11 2023] Northwestern football hazing story comes out. Everyone rightfully up in arms over culture in college football: https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2023/northwestern-football-hazing-pat-fitzgerald-timeline-1234730288/

8. [JULY 11-14] Kuru-infected Husker fans start teasing Fleck’s impending death: sample screenshots above, there were more

9. [JULY 12 2023] AJ Perez, from…Front Office Sports contacts an anon Gopher fan he’d seen on Twitter and Rivals looking for context and recommendations on which player to talk to. Gopher anon tells Perez to talk to Coney Durr:

ASIDE:

10. [JULY 12 2023] Perez allegedly informs Gopher anon that he was investigating Dan Snyder of Washington Commanders ignominy, when “someone put him on to the Fleck thing”:

ASIDE:

11. [JULY 27 2023] Front Office Sports runs the piece. Coney Durr and Hsu are quoted extensively. Badger and Husker fans give each other rub and tugs. Everyone with three operating brain cells ridicules it as an amateur hit job: not linking it. Find it yourself if you must.

12. [JULY 28 2023] Front Office Sports runs a follow up piece with no new information. Conflates the death of a player at Maryland with what Fleck is doing at Minnesota. Provides zero foundation for this comparison: not linking it. Find it yourself if you must

And here we are today.

So, the narrative I see here is as follows: Stahl was a source on NIL stuff for Front Office Sports in June and sold them on the idea that Fleck is an evil dude who should be taken down. To juice it up, he offered Hsu, a former Regent, who would go on the record with his concerns of the program. Seems intriguing and worth looking into, right?

Perez talks to a former player or two that Stahl buddied up with that corroborated Stahl’s version of reality. Talks to Hsu who does the same and then, bang, Northwestern implodes, Fitz gets fired and all of a sudden we have a #MeToo moment in college football. Perez realizes he has to strike while the iron is hot, but only has one side of the story. So what does he do? Pings a random Gopher fan from the message boards, of course! Stahl, bursting with excitement at the idea of downing his nemesis, shares what’s happening with a few of his Nubber Twitter buds.

There isn’t a full story there, but the #MeToo moment is passing and the story has to run. So we got what we got yesterday and today: A barely-newsworthy re-hash of old news, sprinkled in with some quotes from a known-crackpot former Regent. It’s extremely noteworthy that Stahl was not mentioned in the piece, despite being a source for other Front Office Sports stories. Guy really had nothing to say about this? Or are we keeping him behind the curtain because he’s already tried and failed once to take Fleck down and using him here would damage the credibility of the piece?

Anyway, I’m going to return to the sea for another 10,000 years. Go Gophs. RTB.

If

2022-10-01T15:36:00.003-05:00

The Gophers lost a game at home that they were widely expected to win. Or as we call that in Minnesota, “Christmas for Vikings avatar guys who want you to know how little they care and how dumb YOU are for caring.” My employer gives me 2 flex PTO days for it every year as a religious observance.

The theme of the day from a lot of the fans I interact with was “if”, specifically how things might have been different if something else had happened.

“If we call a different play on the 4^th Down in the 1^st Quarter.”

“If Mike Brown-Stephens catches that ball in the end zone.”

“If Braelen Oliver possesses the tipped pass.”

“If Terell Smith possesses his tipped pass.”

“If Mo Ibrahim had played.”

If.

For Gophers fans of all generations, “if” has become a maroon and gold rosary, a mental comfort blanket that allows us to justify to ourselves that the bad things weren’t actually that bad, and if not for flukes we would have been right in our predictions. If only one more thing had turned our way. It’s a shared ritual we practice together several times annually.

“If we manage the clock better against Michigan in 2016.”

“If we remember how to take an intentional safety against Wisconsin in 2005.”

“If Lou Holtz had stayed.”

If.

But those things did not happen. Those undiscovered countries are not our reality, however we try to insulate ourselves from it. What DID happen today was our offense was unprepared to play without Mo Ibrahim. Our offensive line showed deficiencies and vulnerabilities. Tanner Morgan was never able to get in rhythm. Jeff Brohm was highly motivated to break the Fleck Curse that has afflicted him since 2018, and his defense in particular did what they had to do to make that happen.

It's another datapoint in what I hope will not convert to a trend under the Fleck tenure: after a series of impressive wins comes a ranking, the associated media frenzy and increased fan attention. Fleck, and by extension others associated with the program, revel in the attention, and come out flat and apparently unprepared the next game. In 2019 it was the Iowa game after Penn State; I recall vividly how tired and unfocused P.J. Fleck appeared in media spots after beating #5 Penn State, and the coaches and team appeared to take on the same dizzy, wandering malaise in Iowa City the following weekend.

Things looked much the same today, and there are lessons to be taken from it for all of us. The most important are for the coaching staff, secondarily for the offense and special teams. The defense played well enough for most of the game to keep us in a position to win; you can’t ask much more than that, whatever happened in the last four minutes. Now there’s a much-needed bye week before going to meet Bert Bielema in Illinois, and a chance to get back on track.

For us who watch and spend out off-hours contemplating the next game and the future glory we hope awaits, it should be remembered that Purdue’s main purpose in the Big Ten of late is serving as a warning to others. They did this most notably against Ohio State in 2018; it turned out to be the Buckey's only loss. Today’s loss does not necessarily mean the West is lost, and it doesn’t mean Minnesota is actually bad. It means the Gophers have weaknesses to be dealt with, in scheme, physicality, and mentality.

There’s more football to play and more fun to be had if the appropriate lessons are taken, if the fire remains, if hope is not lost, if players stay healthy, if the fans keep showing up.

If.

2022: #TITTY or #TITAY

2022-09-12T15:17:00.000-05:00

In 2015 we thought we were going to be pretty good. 2014 was a very solid season, where we beat Michigan and Nebraska, and played in a New Year’s Day bowl game for the first time since the Kennedy administration. The Gophers returned quite a bit from that squad and, despite knowing we’d be playing Michigan and Ohio State in successive weeks, we spent most of the offseason preening and looking up prices for hotels and cocaine in Pasadena.

Your friends at SGH even had t-shirts made. They said “This is Totally the Year.” They had #TITTY printed on the back. We sold a bunch of them. They were cursed. I remain convinced they are the reason Kill had to resign and why Claeys and Limegrover contemplated the void while the ball sat at the one yard line as the last seconds ticked off the clock against Michigan. [Yes, in retrospect I understand these things may have been blessings, but at the time they felt like eating a bowl of farts.]

I saw someone wearing one of those shirts while tailgating before the NMSU game and briefly entertained the idea of bringing them back for the 2022 season; but then decided I want no part in wearing that albatross around my neck if things went sideways again. Props to dude, though. The #TITTY shirts purposefully excluded any dates or references to specific teams, so maybe he was wearing it for this year’s volleyball team. Let’s just go with that.

It did get me thinking about whether #TITTY, though. 2019 certainly was A year; though we came up a little short, finishing the season in the top ten counts for something. Since we didn’t win the West (yes, I know we tied for the crown, but not in any way that mattered beyond the sweet, custom-made brass knuckle and good vibes) and had to watch the Rose Bowl during the flight back from Tampa, it wasn’t THE year. So, 2019 was #TITAY, the pleasant glass of a good wine to #TITTY’s meth-fueled 28-day bender in a lawless Moldova.

Through two games, I haven’t seen anything that says it’s not Totally the Year. We turned both teams into quark matter in every facet of the game. Sure, a team of comprised of 22 bags of week-old soggy doughnuts may have presented a stiffer challenge than the Fighting Kills, but WHO COULD HAVE KNOWN they’d be braised ass when we scheduled them ten years ago? One can only create a lumpless paste out of the teams on the schedule, after all.

Things obviously get a bit more challenging following the bye week against Mike Sanford as we head to East Lansing for the first time since 2013 (a game of which I have absolutely no recollection, btw). This looks to be the toughest game on the schedule and, in my worthless estimation, a stiffer matchup than anything we faced in 2019. We probably don’t have to win that game, but a loss effectively takes our #TITTY margin of error to zero if a Rose Bowl or CFP appearance is the goal.

I think we *can* win out: Penn State and Purdue look competent; Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois may be tough outs; but none of those teams make one lose bowel control. 11-1 with a loss in the B1GCG is probably sufficient to get us to Pasadena. But without a signature win it’s possible we get nipped by the 2^nd-place team in the East if they’re at 11-1 or 10-2.

Don’t let that keep you up though. Focus your gut-consuming angst on what the future prospects of #TITTY are. It’s hard to do because the schedule for next year and beyond is a glowing hell sign of TBD. Divisions are likely going away at the same time USC (and others) will be joining the conference. The expanded CFP offers some hope for breakthrough opportunities, but without knowing how the schedules will be constituted, those prayers could be going to an Old Testament God.

The B1G West has always presented the best path for the Gophers to win the conference and/or get to a nationally meaningful bowl game. And this is likely the last year before that woodsy path is turned into a strip mall. For an Old like me, where going to the Rose Bowl was the goal at the start of every season, it’s important to me that I get to see my team in it before my genes and organs rebel against all of my bad habits. This year may be the last, best shot we have before the end times.

So, I hope #TITTY and not #TITAY for 2022. In some ways, I think it has to be THE year before we’re potentially forced to redefine what THE means to us. It’s all right there and, seemingly, we’re in the catbird seat to make it happen. The margin of error is small, but for Minnesota, it has been for the last 60 years. Why not us, and why not now, friends?

Ghosts in the Narration Machine

2022-09-06T17:14:00.000-05:00

I’ve had a lot of therapy over the last few years. Like, a lot a lot of therapy. Four days a week, 50 weeks out of the year, Mecha-Freud lasering holes in the old brain box. Good experience. Highly recommended.

One of the cool parts about it was learning how my brain processes information. While the catalyst for starting was severe depression / suicidal thinking – from the time I was a pre-teen I had hundreds of intrusive thoughts every day, usually associated with hanging myself or some other mode of casting off my mortal coil (I promise the rest of the piece isn’t this dark; I’m just providing context that this wasn’t a generic case of being glum) – after a few months, my psychiatrist casually mentioned that she didn’t think I was depressed at all; rather, I had subconsciously used the intrusive thoughts to build an identity around being a depressed person. That I was essentially choosing to be depressed.

That really pissed me off. The idea that I would happily opt in to the kms lifestyle as some sort of choice was bizarre and I was big mad. I thought about quitting or finding a new therapist, but the notion of starting over was not terrifically appealing. So, I expressed my dissatisfaction at her customer service over the next few sessions, and we moved on.

Inception is a dangerous thing, though, even without sweet special effects and Tom Hardy. For the first time, I began to see my “thoughts” and my “self” as separate things. Prior to that, I was my thoughts and my thoughts were me – bad thoughts, bad person. Now, there was a … space, I guess, between the processes my brain did on its own and who I was as a conscious agent.

To go all trope up in here, the brain is a computer operating system, conducting background functions so applications – the conscious self in this case – can successfully run on top of it. They’re co-dependent, in that the applications would be unable to process all the inputs/outputs the operating system takes care of and the operating system would be pretty uninteresting to most people if there were no applications to run on it. But while applications are affected by the performance of the operating system, in most cases they can still run reasonably well even if the operating system is glitchy.

And I had a pretty glitchy operating system. It associated all sorts of things that I did/was/thought – all with the most profoundly negative interpretation possible - with who I was as person. The, whatever it is, that created my internal personal narrative was a filthy liar. Of course, prior to therapy, I had no idea any of this was happening and, left totally unchecked, my brain made for a pretty shit operational environment for my conscious experience. To paraphrase the great Mr. Meeseeks, existence was pain. Which brings us to Gopher football!

For most of my life I have been a rabid supporter of Gopher athletics. I wear Gopher gear most days, I’d post on all the message boards, I’d watch replays endlessly on YouTube, I blog(ged) about the Gophers, and would more or less plan my entire life around the football schedule. A big part of my identity – how I saw myself and how I perceived others saw me - was tied up in how the Gopher football team fared.

Of course, we weren’t very good for much of that time and, during the Wacker and Brew years, we were a lot worse than that. When we lost, which was often, and particularly if we lost to Wisconsin, which was an annual rite of sacrifice for half of my adult life, I was inconsolable for days. The ultimately meaningless losses of [INSERT PREFERRED SPORTS TEAM] manifested as despondency and hopelessness in my real life. I was the team, and their very public feats of ineptitude weren’t just a reflection on me; I was somehow personally responsible for that year-old, open can of salmon baking in a hot car.

We Gopher (and Vikings, Twins, Wild, and Wolves) fans often joke about the fact we’re in an abusive relationship with our teams, in that we love them and they always cause us nothing but misery. For me, this was absolutely true; only the pain was from an unhealthy relationship with my brain rather than a poor performance by my squad. The Gophers failures were just a heuristic for my glitchy operating system to interpret itself. Appreciate you, narrator!

This mindset only resolved after my psychiatrist challenged me over the state of my depression. I can’t change most of my operating system. That stuff is just biologically hard coded. You can push at it around the edges with therapy, medication, exercise, and meditation but reprogramming it is like training your eyes to see a basketball when you’re looking at a dumpster. And in a lot of ways, that’s a good thing. My brain’s default state is inwardly focused and hyper creative. I have a very, uh, rich inner experience, which has been critical in my schooling and work; when not appropriately occupied, though, it creates a lot of catastrophic fiction where I am the main character. It definitely has its downside, but it’s mostly a fun and useful partner to have around.

I think the thrust of my therapist’s challenge was the degree to which I was anchored to the distorted reality conveyed by my glitchy brain. I really was depressed, but I was in that state because I let an unreliable narrator tell my story to me. I can’t stop that narrator from telling the story; but, now that I know a choice exists, I can opt to give it a lot less power than I used to. And that’s changed my relationship with everything in my life for the better.

Including Gopher football. I wrapped up therapy in 2019 and, while I still care deeply, still wear Gopher gear most of the time, and still spend too much time on message boards, I keep our beloved rodents safely compartmentalized away from how I feel in real life. Sometimes it feels a bit muted - the lows after a loss aren’t nearly as bleak, while the highs after a win may be a little less frenzied than in the past – but I’m an Old now and that’s probably for the best, lest I stroke out during a game.

I will say, though, the brain compartment where the Gophers live is pretty fired up for this season. The narrator is telling me it’s the most complete team in my life and, while it may lack the star power of the 2019 team, is better across the board. It sees a January trip to Pasadena. Let’s hope it’s a reliable narrator for once.

Fail Better

2021-11-30T07:00:00.003-06:00

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho”

Minnesota will have a new offensive coordinator. It took some disappointment to get there, but perhaps we should be thankful for it rather than frustrated by the missed opportunities. There will be plenty of time to ruminate on those in the future, but my recommendation for you dear reader is not to waste your time fantasizing about what might have been. Because after a season of wondering whether P.J. Fleck had what it took to look in the mirror and make some tough choices, this weekend we were treated to the answer: yes.

The seriousness of this is driven home by the fact that Fleck did not take the opportunity offered by a thorough defeat of Wisconsin to avoid making a long overdue change at the offensive coordinator position. With Monday’s announcement that Mike Sanford Jr. will not be returning in that role, Fleck showed that not even re-possessing Minnesota’s most coveted rivalry trophy can blind him to the offensive issues that put us in such bad situations this season.

You should be very encouraged. The offensive gameplans against Indiana and Wisconsin showed sparks of innovation that were absent in the previous 10 games. The standard poor performance at the end of the 1^st half was still there, but the rest of the performance was more than enough to overcome it. Excellent blocking by Ky Thomas and Derik LeCaptain. Effective play fakes and pitch plays away from the numbers. A touchdown pass to Chris Autman-Bell with routes so good that the Wisconsin secondary literally Keystone-Copped themselves out of the play. Brevyn Spann-Ford.

That this was achieved with Mike Sanford Jr. could easily have been used to justify keeping Sanford around. I fully expected that outcome, and I had come to terms with that as I left the stadium Saturday. That Fleck stuck to his guns and decided to make the move anyway shows not only that he saw the larger issues, but that he wasn’t ok with the results in the back-half of the season and felt the same disappointment as all of us.

Good on him, and lucky for us. I’ve shared my frustration openly on this topic all year. The responsibility Fleck took publicly as head coach was backed up by action, with the result that a respectable 8-4 season was salvaged and Minnesota reclaimed The Axe in Minneapolis for the first time since 2003 when I was still in college. It had the added benefits of costing Wisconsin the Big Tefn West title and simultaneously giving Fleck his 3^rd Top 25 in of his tenure while knocking Wisconsin out of those same polls. For whatever failures he’s had against Iowa (many), as Ben Dawson pointed out Saturday he has now notched as many wins over Wisconsin as Jerry Kill, Tracy Claeys, Tim Brewster, and Glen Mason combined. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, but he’s taking the steps he said he was willing to take. That’s all I can ask for.

It feels great to be touched by optimism again, and here’s my recommendation to you: enjoy the post-season and don’t dwell too much on what could have been. Enjoy a Big Ten Championship game that doesn’t feature Wisconsin or Ohio State, and know we had a part in making that happen. Enjoy the bowl game, whatever it is. Enjoy knowing that Wisconsin is playing in a lower bowl game than they expected. Enjoy watching the coaching carousel knowing we probably won’t have to be part of it. Enjoy the knowledge we will get a fresh start on offense; if it's anything like what Joe Rossi did to the defense, it's going to be fun.

Like 2018, an embarrassment to Illinois stripped us of a mismatched coordinator, and our season was redeemed against Wisconsin. If you need to reflect on anything, reflect that what we define as a “disappointment” is no longer 4-8 or 6-6, but 8-4. Folks, that’s called progress, and if it's a failure, at least we fail better.

Row the boat, Ski-U-Mah, Go Gophers.

What The Ostrich Sees in the Sand

2021-11-07T21:39:00.005-06:00

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand. -Samuel Beckett, “Murphy”

The excitement of P.J. Fleck’s 7 year extension didn’t so much fade over the weekend as it was doused with bleach. I’ve tried hard to bury the fatalism I’ve lived with since the MicronPC.com Bowl. It’s getting harder to lie to myself; the big new paycheck combined with Brett Bielema’s return to Minneapolis gave this all the makings of a trap game, and it delivered.

I observed after Bowling Green that Fleck needed to do more than just take responsibility for the loss. Better performance over the month of October had better results, but I’m hard-pressed to point to specific actions beyond “we looked more focused and prepared”. When Illinois went up 14-0 and our answer was four possessions and zero points, we all knew where this was headed.

So, in the spirit of phoning in offensive coaching against a motivated underdog with nothing to lose, the rest of this post is an edit of my Bowling Green assessment. I removed some sections; you can find the whole thing here. I assume my efforts in redactions and editing are commensurate or superior to the effort our offensive coaching staff put in to out-scheming the Illinois gameplan.

P.J. Fleck’s ~~pre-season~~ pattern has become clear: conservative, clock-grinding ball control wherein the final score doesn’t matter as long as you come away with a win and don’t show your cards. That means few double-digit beatdowns, it means media snark, and it means you’re always flying close enough to the sun that one ~~touchdown~~ interception can change everything.

Saturday the inevitable happened again. The defense did their jobs, allowing 2 touchdowns and holding ~~Bowling Green~~ Illinois to under ~~200~~ 275 yards. But in a game where our supposedly NFL-bound offensive line never got consistent push, Tanner Morgan was frequently pressured and threw poorly even when not, when wide receivers couldn’t get separation, when special teams reverted to their prior form, it would take inspired coaching to make sure the defense had done enough.

What we saw instead confirmed every whispered fear and written media criticism of the staff. There can be no question that the team and their coaches were not prepared to face even a MAC team projected to finish at or near the bottom of their conference. Our propensity for playing down to the level of our opponent has been one of the most consistent and frustrating features of the Fleck era.

It remains in P.J. Fleck’s power to fix. He has previously shown the willingness to make drastic player and staff decisions that change the course of the season. ~~I firmly believe~~ That is needed again. The co-offensive coordinator situation between Matt Simons and Mike Sanford Jr. which never made much sense to begin with, must be resolved. Based on prior performance, it’s hard to reach any other conclusion than that Mike Sanford Jr. holds a lot of the responsibility. The ~~4th and 1 in which we came out of a timeout with a run-up-the-middle play (that may well have worked without the timeout)~~ continued insistence on running the play clock down to 2 even as we were running out of time in the 4th Quarter was a fireable offense. More questions than answers remain for Rob Wenger at Special Teams, questions such as how he managed to ruin Matthew Trickett, whose Field Goal efficiency has dropped 23.7% compared to a career 82.4% average at Kent State.

Fleck himself may be tired of repeatedly having to accept publicly that the responsibility is 100% his (a situation perhaps eased by his new paycheck). He needs to take action to show that this is more than lip service. There is a reason that high-tier programs make a habit of turning ~~G5 non-conference~~ Illinois games into snoozers. Games like this simply cannot happen (twice in the same season!) for a coach whose stated goals include conference championships and playoff appearances. ~~What role if any was played by USC is speculation, but if there was any smoke it’s gone now. Not worth discussing~~.

Fleck has done much more good than harm in building talent, culture, and interest. Late 2018 and 2019 showed that when motivated, organized, and willing to take risks he can perform. Our individual and team talent is sufficiently high to salvage a successful 2021 season, such that this eventually becomes remembered like the ~~2018 Illinois game~~ 2021 Bowling Green game as a much-needed wake-up call. I fear that the difference this time is that changing out coordinators isn’t enough, though it’s a good start: he will need to look his own game philosophy in the eye and consider whether his own approach is up to the challenge of the times.

Whether that happens or not is entirely in P.J. Fleck’s hands. Until he provides an alternative, it's nothing new.

Nothing New

2021-09-26T20:59:00.006-05:00

The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new. – Samuel Beckett, “Murphy”

In the early hours of what was for me August 30^th, 2019 I boarded a KLM flight in Abu Dhabi, planning to spend a good portion of my flight watching the Gophers mopping up South Dakota State. I had made all the preparations to live-stream the game on my tablet, with one exception: I forgot that the flight didn’t have WiFi. When I reached my layover in Amsterdam I was so confident in the result I found a restroom, coffee, a stroopwafel, and a comfortable seat before checking the score. 28-21 hit me with an intensity that belied by jet-lagged brain.

I was also away during the Fresno State game and didn’t have to suffer that tight overtime victory in real-time. It wasn’t until September 14^th I attended a game in person, vs. Georgia Southern. I spent the beautiful afternoon gripped by the sense of impending doom familiar to all Gopher fans, simultaneously relieved and horrified (relorrified?) to come away with the 35-32 last-drive victory. Walking back to the River Flats a friend observed I was lucky to only have had to see this once.

The rest of the 2019 season salved those wounds, but in times of quiet reflection since I sometimes slip back to how different things could have been starting 1-2 instead of 3-0.

So confident was I that Saturday’s game against Bowling Green State would be one of frustrating Tressel-ball that I started writing this nearly 2 weeks ago and picked the opening quote at that time. P.J. Fleck’s pre-season pattern has become clear: conservative, clock-grinding ball control wherein the final score doesn’t matter as long as you come away with a win and don’t show your cards. That means few double-digit beatdowns, it means media snark, and it means you’re always flying close enough to the sun that one touchdown can change everything.

Close non-conference matchups against inferior opponents are nothing new for any Gopher fan born later than 1950. Devastating losses against them are nothing new for anyone who remembers Jim Wacker and Tim Brewster. Those were materially different because the overall hopelessness was pretty clear, but if Miami (OH) showed us anything it was that the risk is always there.

Saturday the inevitable happened. The defense did their jobs, allowing 2 touchdowns and holding Bowling Green to under 200 yards. But in a game where our supposedly NFL-bound offensive line never got consistent push, Tanner Morgan was frequently pressured and threw poorly even when not, when wide receivers couldn’t get separation, when special teams reverted to their prior form, it would take inspired coaching to make sure the defense had done enough.

It remains in P.J. Fleck’s power to fix. He has previously shown the willingness to make drastic player and staff decisions that change the course of the season. I firmly believe that is needed again. The co-offensive coordinator situation between Matt Simons and Mike Sanford Jr. which never made much sense to begin with, must be resolved. Based on prior performance, it’s hard to reach any other conclusion than that Mike Sanford Jr. holds a lot of the responsibility. The 4^th and 1 in which we came out of a timeout with a run-up-the-middle play (that may well have worked without the timeout) was a fireable offense. More questions than answers remain for Rob Wenger at Special Teams.

Fleck himself may be tired of repeatedly having to accept publicly that the responsibility is 100% his. He needs to take action to show that this is more than lip service. There is a reason that high-tier programs make a habit of turning G5 non-conference games into snoozers. Games like this simply cannot happen for a coach whose stated goals include conference championships and playoff appearances. What role if any was played by USC is speculation, but if there was any smoke it’s gone now. Not worth discussing.

Fleck has done much more good than harm in building talent, culture, and interest. Late 2018 and 2019 showed that when motivated, organized, and willing to take risks he can perform. Our individual and team talent is sufficiently high to salvage a successful 2021 season, such that this eventually becomes remembered like the 2018 Illinois game as a much-needed wake-up call. I fear that the difference this time is that changing out coordinators isn’t enough: he will need to look his own game philosophy in the eye and consider whether his own approach is up to the challenge of the times.

Whether that happens or not is entirely in P.J. Fleck’s hands. Until he provides an alternative, it's nothing new.

Things Lost, Things Gained

2021-09-02T00:31:00.002-05:00

How do you unpack general existence since the last “normal” Gopher football game at the Outback Bowl back on January 1^st of what we didn’t yet know would be The Pandemic Year? I haven’t really tried yet. It’s a lot, and it’s way too much for a last-minute, impulse-driven post on a sports blog that will be seen by tens of loyal readers. Enough has been written on the events of 2020-2021 by people far more talented than me and I don’t even want to read THOSE. We’re all yearning for something that existed before. Thing is, it probably won’t be back like it was, but maybe that’s not all bad. If beating SEC teams in January 1^st bowls is going to be the nEw NoRmAl, count me in.

I am going to indulge in one paragraph of personal reflection. Last year sucked. Remember how gray and cloudy January, 2020 was? Just awful. Worst month ever. Then some other stuff happened. I felt cheated and angry at for so many things I cared about and was looking forward to being ripped away. Simultaneously I felt extremely guilty about that because I knew I should be grateful it wasn’t worse. I lost my dad, not to COVID but to cancer, and I lost precious time with him because I couldn’t risk being in the same room with him and getting him sick. I was unreasonably angry that my family couldn’t visit us in the hospital when my son was born. Work took over every aspect of life; hard year to be in healthcare. We missed out on holidays, couldn’t introduce our son to the world like we wanted. Crushing anxiety, frustration, loss of whatever faith I still had in humanity. But the pandemic didn’t take anyone from me…my family is as well as it could possibly be. We have shelter, employment, money in the bank, and a child who deserves to see the beauty in life and not focus on the pain. A lot of people, hundreds of millions, have it so much worse.

What I gained from this was realizing that my anger and sadness were still legitimate even if they weren’t as serious as those faced by others. Feel it, accept it, but maintain perspective and don’t allow it to dominate your being. You’re not obligated to put your time and treasure into fighting bad-faith from others; it’s ok to detach here and there, to take care of yourself and come back. You have to be good for yourself to be able to be good for others. Have some grace, I guess is what I’m saying. Maybe someone can say it better than me. If it’s you, please direct your blog proposals and drafts to Frothy.Gopher@prodigy.net. He needs better help than me.

One thing navigating this past year has done for me is focus my mind and heart on what I truly value. If anything, I have a much better grasp of who I am than before all this happened. Call it a sense of purpose, acceptance of your place in the world, whatever you want. What I know is that the detached “LOL none of this matters” approach I’ve taken for years was not only misdirected but was a defense mechanism against dealing with reality. All of this matters; it matters a lot.

I found solace in things that used to matter to me once upon a time. A lot of things suddenly felt meaningful that hadn’t excited me for years. On the flip-side, missing out on college football hurt less than I expected, and it made me wonder if I still cared as much as I thought I did. I felt (and still do) that the cautions taken were warranted. Did this…do sports…really matter?

Well, the final thing I gained was the solid confidence that the answer is “Yes.” Slowly but surely the sense of community it’s always given me is coming back, like we never left. Stats, prognostications, tailgate plans, somehow finding agreement with Iowa and Wisconsin fans on something (Nebraska). It feels like a song you haven’t heard in a decade but you still remember all the words, but in a way that’s beyond repetition. It sparks memories, who you were with, the happiness you had, the trouble you got into, even the smell of a college house party. It all comes flooding back and you’re home.

Today the Minnesota Golden Gophers take on the Ohio State Buckeyes in front of fans for the first time in 19 months. It might not be the most talented team we’ve faced since ~~TCF Bank~~ Huntington Bank Stadium opened but it’s probably pretty close. The likelihood we’ll win is extraordinarily small.

But it’s not nothing.

Regardless of the outcome, I’ll be ok and so will you. We’ll all be with our friends, our family, and our friends who ARE family. We’ll share in a communal experience we’ll value with even greater intensity than before. A lot of us will be puddles multiple times during the day. That’s ok too; embrace the feelings both good and bad. They’re a gift and we’re all so lucky to be able to feel them.

And who knows? Maybe we’ll have more reason to be happy than we think.

After all, as they say, hope springs eternal.

Ski-U-Mah, Row the Boat, Go Gophers.

Minnesota Gopher Football is 0-2- Here's Hoping PJ Fleck Can Fix It

2020-10-31T12:37:00.004-05:00

After a shocking 0-2 start to the 2020 season, for some faction of the Minnesota Gopher football fan base it appears we’ve already reached “If you have even the slightest doubts about PJ Fleck and the state of the program you’re a traitor and fair weather fan.” Cool cool cool cool cool. There are both political and religious connections to be made here to fanatical and blind following of a leader but with everything else going on this crazy ass year, let’s not go down that road today, shall we?

For the record, I am not out on PJ Fleck and I am not here to call for his head. However, I do have a few questions and comments and perhaps concerns about the state of the program and, well, this seemed as good a place as any to express them (sorry Frothy).

Watching a shockingly bad defense and a not-so-shockingly bad special teams these first two games I am reminded of how difficult it is to be a good football coach at the P5 level, and how especially difficult it is to pull off at Minnesota. A big part of the sheer terror for some of admitting everything isn’t as, um, “rosy” for Fleck and this program as we believed even just two weeks ago is exactly because of how hard it is to win at Minnesota. Since the glory years of the 60’s we’ve seen many different coaches with many different ideas try and fail to win consistently here. It hasn’t happened prior to PJ Fleck because he or the other coaches are bad, it’s just a reminder this is one of the toughest Power 5 jobs in the league.

Fleck’s background and mantra and strengths as a head coach are as a CEO and leader- he’s not considered an X’s and O’s guy on either side of the ball, and that’s ok. We’ve seen many examples of this type of coach being successful all over college football, with Dabo at Clemson being the most extreme positive example. But for that CEO coach to be successful he needs to be able to consistently recognize and bring in coaching talent onto his staff (especially at the offensive and defensive coordinators) and it also helps if he’s really good at recruiting and developing.

But the other really key thing that often gets overlooked for ANY head coach to have sustained success is they need to be adaptable. Time and again we see the hot shot head coach in college or the NFL who worked his way up through the ranks as an offensive or defensive guru and they have success at first or maybe even for awhile. But then the game shifts and they cannot or will not shift with it (Hi Chip Kelly! Hi Mike Zimmer!), OR whatever worked for them at lower levels just isn’t going to work as well at the Power 5 level.

A perfect example of this is actually the guy who came before PJ- well fine the guy who came before the guy who came before PJ- Jerry “Have I told you lately how much I hate PJ Fleck?” Kill. Country Jer was the epitome of the work your way up the ladder CEO coach whose track record said he should have succeeded not just at the P5 level, but he should have succeeded here. And health problems aside, for a time he did. But by year 4 it became apparent he was a little TOO loyal to his long-time assistants and that the real key to his success was Tracey Claeys and the defense. On offense Matt Limegrover was in WAY over his head as an OC (and perhaps even as a line coach) and he had no one on staff who could develop anything besides running backs (I give them no credit for that one generational TE- Hi Maxx!).

While he clearly wasn’t and isn’t cut out to be a head coach, Claeys and DB coach (and eventually DC) Jay Sawvel proved incredible and borderline miraculous at turning “MAC-level” defensive recruits into good players and even NFL draft picks at Minnesota. At least until they moved onto their next jobs at Wazzu and Wake and then suddenly they couldn’t. Which again speaks to how freaking hard and frankly weird coaching college football is. Everything a coach does works until it doesn’t and then we find out if they’re good enough to figure out how to make it work again.

Two games into Fleck’s fourth season, that’s where we suddenly find ourselves. Whatever worked for him last year in an awesome and wondrous 11 win season is so far not working at all this season. If you want to pick nits about the offense feel free, but I’m not here to do that today. And yes, I watched the 4th quarter prevent offense against Maryland that helped the Gophs eventually lose the game, but I believe that’s more about the HC’s philosophy than the OC’s at this point. Remember all those vanilla offenses we’ve seen in the non-con under Fleck with Kirk Ciarrocca? I think that’s more PJ than his OC, but I’m willing to wait and see on that one.

I’m also not going to talk about special teams because what is there to talk about? They were atrocious last year under Rob Wenger and they’re atrocious again this year under Rob Wenger. I’m going to go out on a very short and sturdy limb and say they will be atrocious as long as Wenger is the special teams coach, so until Peej realizes this and finds a new ST coach, I don’t know why we’d expect anything else.

But the defense? That is one of my two big questions right now for PJ Fleck- WTF is happening on defense? Or perhaps more accurately NOT happening on defense right now? DC Joe Rossi seemed like a revelation two seasons ago when he replaced Robb Smith near the end of the 2018 season. The D suddenly looked competent- including a win over Wisconsin!!!- and then they were mostly awesome last year. But thus far in two games it’s like Robb Smith has kidnapped Rossi and secretly replaced him because it looks exactly like the Robb Smith defenses we saw previously. Sure, we lost Winfield some key and very good players like Antoine Winfield Jr, Kamal Martn, Thomas Barber, and Carter Coughlin, so I was expecting a few bumps out of the gate. But these are not bumps in the road, this is the road spewing open a gateway to hell. This just looks like complete and total incompetence in all facets and I do not understand how we got here considering how Rossi had coached previously.

Fleck as CEO coach is going to be more dependent on how good his coordinator hires are, and we’re seeing that now- it’s too early to say on Mike Sanford, I don’t know what the hell is going on with Rossi but I’m worried, and it’s WAY past time to say on Wenger.

The other issue is one I didn’t think we’d need to be worried about but this one falls squarely on PJ- depth. He has without question improved Minnesota’s recruiting since he got here- the Gophs are consistently bringing in better recruits with not just better star ratings, but to me the mark that we’re getting better players is that their offer sheets consistently include other P5 schools. That’s a very good thing. That said, as we learned with Tim Brewster, recruiting rankings don’t mean anything if you can’t develop that talent. I’m not saying Fleck and his staff definitively cannot develop talent, but I am at least wondering whether we have an issue there, and if it’s more to do with his coordinators or position coaches or what. Kill and Claeys may have gotten “MAC-level” recruits but on defense at least it didn’t matter when Claeys kept turning them into good players and a good defense. Fleck has had three full recruiting classes now and we’re not seeing much in results thus far on D now that the Empire Class that Kill and Claeys recruited are gone. Some of that- a lot of that?- could be just scheme and maybe the talent is much better than what the results have shown but hoo boy when the results are THIS bad it has to leave you wondering at least a little.

On offense, the skill positions look great and that’s really all Fleck kids at this point, but O-line depth is rearing its ugly head yet again, a consistent and frustrating theme for every staff since Glen Mason got fired. For the first time since Mason we had 6 B1G quality O-linemen last year, which was great because we never had to really go past those 6. But in two games this season the right side of the O-line has been missing and it’s been a real problem as we appear to be left with just four good linemen and nothing else.

Why, and how do we fix it? That’s what PJ Fleck is now facing this season on defense, along the O-line and really at depth everywhere on the roster. In hindsight maybe B1G West champs were too high of expectations in a season with no spring or summer practices during a pandemic and we clearly underestimated the impact of losing some key contributors, but it still should be better than this. I still love PJ Fleck as the head coach of this team- I promise I’m not a traitor or a bandwagon fan- but the honeymoon is over. The mark of a good coach is not just having initial success, but when things stop working, can he figure out how to fix it? We’ll find out soon enough how good and adaptable Coach Fleck is with how well he rows the boat through some very tough waters the rest of the season.

Big Ten Football 2020: Setting Sail

2020-10-23T01:40:00.119-05:00

Oh hi, I’m Outstate Biff. You’ve caught me writing an escapist, self-indulgent blog post.

Big Ten football is back. And not like Texas…like, it’s literally back.

The college football season, such as it is, has been bizarre in ways not seen since the 1918-1919 seasons which is a weird coincidence I’m sure someone will look into sometime. It remains to be seen whether the Big Ten’s decision to postpone the start of the season will add stability, but it can’t be much worse than what’s happened so far. In retrospect, the decisions made by the Big Ten and PAC-12 to delay their start dates may end up looking not so bad in the long-run.

I’m in an odd place. I work in healthcare (usual disclaimers apply: I’m not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, this should not be construed as representing the views of my employer, etc etc), and the pandemic has dominated my waking hours. Do I believe we should be playing? Um...I…don’t really know; I have my doubts. But I’m also sufficiently hypocritical to watch the hell out of it, and I could use the distraction.

It’s been a tough year of relentless long work weeks since February, always playing from behind. I’ve experienced death (my dad) and birth (my son). COVID robbed my family of much of the normal comforts that are supposed to come with those events, and free time has been rare. To cope, I’ve found other escapes, one of which will soon be Big Ten football. Another has been Yacht Rock. Building something in the garage, watching a sunset on the deck, driving to the store for a month of quarantine supplies…the soundtrack has been Yacht Rock.

Now, I don’t mean the adulterated garbage you get from the Sirius XM Yacht Rock channel or Fleetwood Mac cover bands in captain’s hats. I mean the real thing, originated in concept in a 12-episode web series that began in 2005, and further defined in a now-defunct (but soon to be reborn) podcast and website hosted by the web series creators.

The Yacht Rock Era occurred from the mid-70s to mid-80s, with a handful of more recent examples. The web series defined the genre as music with high production value thanks to improved recording techniques that became available in the mid-70s, a core group of elite studio musicians with a lot of cross-pollination between bands, influences from jazz and R&B like complex chord structures and “smooth” sound, lyrics often about heartbroken and/or foolish characters, and rhythmic characteristics similar to the gold-standard Doobie Brothers “What A Fool Believes” and Toto’s “Hold The Line”.

What is Not Yacht (Nyacht)? The Eagles. Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl) by Looking Glass. Jimmy god-damn Buffett. They’re of the era, and sometimes touch some of the characteristics but they lack enough of them to count. If your Yacht Rock playlist includes them, you might be listening to soft rock, adult-oriented rock, or the West Coast Sound, but it’s not Yacht Rock. I’m not a purist about much, but This Is It.

So with Yacht Rock on the brain, football in the future, and desperate for an escape, I’m taking a self-indulgent journey into a world where Big Ten football programs are defined by Yacht Rock songs. To give us an even 20, talk some football-adjacent topics of interest too. I define “program” however I want…an arbitrary combination of the characteristics of the school, coaches, players, history, program image, recent record, fanbases, and my own personal biases…the best KIND of biases!

Let’s set sail.

Nebraska
The Song: Look Who’s Lonely Now (Bill LaBounty, 1982)

The Lyric:
Look who’s lonely now
Welcome to the other side

Falling to average or below-average from the greatest heights is hard, and a mourning period is natural. History is replete with examples: The Spanish Empire. Cadillac. Lead. The list goes on. That’s what makes it so hard being a Nebraska fan.

It’s a comforting self-justification to tell yourself that you’re actually WAY closer to getting back than everyone thinks! I can see how that creates a predilection to be angry when the unenlightened-other doesn’t see things the same way. Nonetheless for virtually a year straight the entire Nebraska fanbase, coaching staff, and athletic department has seemed to be dedicated to forcing even the most sympathetic outsiders to roll their eyes. Not long ago Scott Frost was complaining about having to play the lower-rung Big Ten football programs. After pitching a fit about the Big Ten’s season cancellation and strongly-hinting at taking their ball and going…somewhere else, Bill Moos is complaining about playing the same set of teams they would have played if COVID hadn’t happened because they have to start with Ohio State. Who now is supposedly going to be their new rival? For…reasons? Oh, and they’re TOTALLY responsible for bringing back Big Ten football.

Well, congratulations, you've whined your way to a uniquely lonely place among Big Ten teams. You've made me agree with Badger fans with uncomfortable frequency and I’m not sure how I come back from that. Enjoy the winter.

Iowa
The Song: Any Major Dude Will Tell You (Steely Dan, 1974)

The Lyric:
I’ve never seen you lookin’ so bad my funky one
You tell me that your super-fine mind has come and gone
Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again

When I think of Iowa football I think stability. The Hayden Fry and Kirk Ferentz eras have been remarkable for their consistency in success and styles of play. Aside from a brief period in the late 90s, Iowa has been solid fundamental football, good defense, regular mid-to-upper tier bowl games, and a threat to punt at any time. So the internal program churn that has coincided with the pandemic has made this the most challenging year for Iowa that I can recall. I have no special knowledge or really any opinions on what is and isn’t truth for the current challenges to the Ferentz Administration, but somehow I doubt it’s going to be enough to bring the train to a stop. But then, I’m no major dude.

Minnesota
The Song: Sweet Freedom (Michael McDonald, 1986)

The Lyric:
Always searchin’ for the real thing
Livin’ like it’s far away
Just leave all the madness in yesterday
You’re holdin’ the key when you believe it

The 2019 season was a cleansing experience for Gopher fans and the program overall, but it was neither the top of the mountain nor a sure thing to be repeated. It did not remove doubt or prove that we’ve become Big Ten elite. What it did do is show that the things we always thought we couldn’t do were not actually impossible. We can win the big game sometimes. We can get Gameday to campus. Recruits will come here. We can have a passing game as long as it’s run by a CPA.

For Minnesota fans that means no longer having to believe that we can never achieve more and that the 8-4 so many thought was the ceiling was artificial. 2020 begins with another big game against Michigan for The Jug. Minnesota has not beaten Michigan in Minneapolis since 1977, three stadiums ago. It’s not a lock either way. But we can win, and cut one more head from the hydra.

Sweet Freedom.

Wisconsin
The Song: What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me (Chaka Khan, 1981)

The Lyric:
When the chips are down?

What cha’ gonna do for me?

As a Gopher fan coming of age in the late 90s and early 2000s, it seemed like Wisconsin really had it made. Going from nothing to frequent Rose Bowls in less than 10 years, never having to doubt a bowl trip (except for 2001), and a (earned) dismissive attitude towards what was supposed to be their primary rival. Yet I’ve learned Wisconsin fans aren’t satisfied. Every Big Ten Championship Game loss to Ohio State, every lost Rose Bowl, all I hear is “same old Badgers, can’t win the big one”. Maybe that’s true…it’s a situation I still wouldn’t mind being in, and maybe I’ll be lucky to feel the same way in 2-3 years. Until then, for Wisconsin fans, it doesn’t seem like it’s ever enough.

Illinois
The Song: Lotta Love (Nicolette Larson, 1978)

The Lyric:
It’s gonna take a lotta love, to change the way things are
It’s gonna take a lotta love, or we won’t get too far

Lovie Smith supposedly has his best team at Illinois this year. Reflect on that for a moment. I’ll grant you that the trend has technically been upwards, but since 2016 Lovie has won 8 Big Ten conference games (yes, I know one was against Minnesota) and 15 games total, but I won’t be too rough since another one was last year against #6 Wisconsin. A chaos season in 2020 presents Illinois a unique opportunity. However Illinois has problems that go much further and deeper into their past than the current coaching staff. From experience, that change doesn’t happen overnight; there are still rough years ahead.

Northwestern
The Song: Sailing (Christopher Cross, 1979)

The Lyric:
It’s not far to never-never land/No reason to pretend
And if the wind is right you can find the joy/Of innocence again
Oh, the canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see
Believe me

It’s too easy but I’ll still take the cheap shot: Northwestern is uniquely qualified for 2020 given that a non-trivial portion of their fanbase has always been empty seats and tarps. Their nice campus on Lake Michigan gives TV commentators convenient talking points as the camera pans across the empty stadium even in good years, but I’ve found Northwestern fans to be mostly good-natured about it and realistic unless they’re trying to convince you their main rival is actually Iowa. Best to accept fate as it is; Pat Fitzgerald is doing the best he can with what he can. When it’s good it’s pretty good and when it’s bad it’s 2019. Rig up those tarps and set sail, the lake breeze will make it all right again.

Purdue
The Song: You Did Cut Me (China Crisis, 1985)

The Lyric:
Hear my silence, see my blindness
A love ascending, and never ending
You did cut me, from the same tree
A love incision, my inner vision

Jeff Brohm is the second highest paid coach in the Big Ten. He’s 17-21 in three seasons. Purdue fans and some notable commentators think this might be the year. Purdue lost the core of their defense after last season. Jeff Brohm is the second highest paid coach in the Big Ten.

Indiana
The Song: One Step Closer (The Doobie Brothers, 1980)

The Lyric:

I know it’s risky now and then, what with all the what ifs and the whens
Who is there to say we’re wrong? To tell us it can’t be?

Tom Allen is the lowest paid coach in the Big Ten, and the greatest bargain. Indiana’s 2019 season was fun and it really felt like a big step especially for that program even without the bowl win they needed to break a streak going back to 1991. Like Illinois, 2020 presents a special opportunity for Indiana in a chaos season. Who knows if there will be bowl games at all, but even if not, they can make noise in the East Division this year, and set up nicely for 2021.

Michigan State
The Song: Show You the Way (Thundercat, 2017)

The Lyric:
Your heart is struggling baby
Trying to believe that there might be something you just couldn’t see
But what if I told you that it’s all so easy

The departure of Mark Dantonio after the 2019 season was like the final domino falling of many that affected the entire Michigan State athletic department for the past several years. Most of their misery has been of their own making, with tragic results far beyond win and loss records. MSU is hoping that Mel Tucker can show them the way from this dark place, and I’m sure it won’t take MSU fans much to believe that positive change is coming to East Lansing and that on the edge of darkness there’s a brightest light. Just remember that change doesn’t come without effort and pain.

Michigan
The Song: Je Reviens (Gilles Rivard, 1981)

The Lyric:

I saw boredom, my enemy (J’ai vu l’ennui, mon ennemi)
Got lost in unknown land (Me suis perdu enterre connue)
Sleep during the day (Dormir le jour)
Look for the night in avenues full of strangers (Chercher la nuit dans des evenues plein d’inconnus)

Not going to lie, I mostly was looking for a way to shoehorn this song in somewhere and Michigan, the Harvard of the West, seemed like the most appropriate place to plop some Quebecois French. It’s convenient that the lyrics, such as Google Translate interprets them, fit so well.

I feel like I’ve been hearing about Michigan being BACK longer than Texas. I was a sophomore in high school when they shared the National Championship with Nebraska, and it’s been a slow downhill since then. Michigan remains stronger than Nebraska, and 2019 was actually a pretty good year, but Jim Harbaugh still hasn’t won The Game and Ohio State’s chokehold on the East Division remains unchallenged. For Michigan it feels like it’s been 9 straight seasons of growing ennui, truly an unknown land for this program. Who are all these strangers with us in the standings? What’s a Hoosier?

Ohio State
The Song: Mornin’ (Al Jarreau, 1983)

The Lyric:
Then higher still/beyond the blue until
I know I can/like any man
Reach out my hand/and touch the face of God

How can Ohio State possibly not feel good about where things stand? The only Big Ten program that has consistently challenged the SEC for the past decade (until Auburn ran into Minnesota, anyway) continues to reload. Every season for tOSU is like a walk on a bright summer morning; even the bad parts are pretty good.

Penn State
The Song: Fragments of Time (Daft Punk feat. Todd Edwards, 2013)

The Lyric:

Familiar faces I’ve never seen
Living the gold and the silver dream
Making me feel like I’m seventeen
And it’s crystal clear/That I don’t ever want it to end

If you’d told me 10 years ago that Penn State would be where they are as a program right now I wouldn’t have believed you. The scandal that brought down the Paterno dynasty seemed to be pretty definitive, but here we are. James Franklin has done an extremely impressive job since coming to PSU from Vanderbilt and though they remain second in line in the East Division, the PSU program remains very strong and continues to head the right direction.

For a segment of the PSU fanbase, compartmentalization remains the rule. There are two versions, of which the selective memory group picking the fragments of time they like and discarding those they don't is larger and less nasty than the “We Was Framed!” group, but it’s still a shame. It prevents me from ever fully being able to pull for PSU.

Maryland
The Song: Foolish Heart (Steve Perry, 1984)

The Lyric:

Foolish heart hear me calling
Stop before you start falling
Foolish heart heed my warning
You’ve been wrong before, don’t be wrong anymore

Maryland hired Mike Locksely. He won 2 games in 2.5 seasons at New Mexico and punched one of his coaches. Granted he’s won 4 games at Maryland but, come on, we all know how this is going to end. I don’t know any Maryland fans, so I have to assume they’re all just holding their breath. Don’t get too attached, gang.

Rutgers
The Song: Any World (That I’m Welcome To) (Steely Dan, 1974)

The Lyric:

I’ll be ready when my feet touch ground, where I come down
And if the folks will have me, then they’ll have me

I’m not going to make fun of Rutgers; I’ve always had a soft spot for them. You could make an argument that Maryland wasn’t gaining much (other than that sweet, sweet cash) coming to the Big Ten but there’s not much question this was a serious upgrade for Rutgers, and they seem pretty honest about feeling lucky to have landed somewhere decent during realignment. Greg Schiano, while a predictable hire, was also a decent one and he can’t do worse than Chris Ash. If I’m a Rutgers fan I’m feeling fairly relieved right now.

Kevin Warren
The Song: Nobody’s Business (Maxus, 1981)

The Lyric:

One way or another, I hope you discover
We’re together but always alone
It’s your attention I need, do you have trouble focusing?

My personal opinion, shared previously on #TAWpod, is that the Big Ten was entirely justified in their original decision to cancel the season, and also justified in reevaluating that decision once they had a test and trace infrastructure. I was a vocal defender of this on Twitter. I also feel that the decision belonged with the Presidents and Commissioner based on medical advice rather than well-intentioned but less-informed ADs, coaches, players, and parents.

All that said, would it have hurt at all to be more transparent? To share background, medical reports, meeting summaries or even minutes? The entire process was carried out behind a curtain and developed a decidedly smoke-filled-room feel that only fueled further speculation. Was Kevin Warren obligated to share more? No, but that was his choice and his secrecy did not help his PR; it made a bad situation more challenging. That’s ultimately on him; it didn’t have to be this way.

Clay Travis, Lou Holtz, and the Like
The Song: What A Fool Believes (The Doobie Brothers, 1979)

The Lyric:
But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power/To reason away

The origin song of all of Yacht Rock deserves a special place, and these guys have earned it. Clay Travis has made a virtual second career of misinterpreting and misrepresenting science, medicine, testing, and epidemiology. The inverse relationship between knowledge and self-confidence is a hallmark of our time.

Likewise Lou Holtz, whose single talking point has been comparing the risks college athletes, coaches, and fans would face from COVID to the risks faced by American soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy. Lou was 7 in 1944 and he's 83 now with the luxury of calling into ESPN from home so it's worth noting that neither risks are ones he has to take himself. If Lou ever starts selling insurance, you should pass on it because he clearly does not comprehend the differences in risk categories. National Socialism wasn't spread by aerosols and droplets, and the men at Omaha and Utah beaches were at least paid, knew what they were up against, and had the full force of American industry behind them. Comparing the risks they took to the the risk of playing football during a pandemic is both grossly disrespectful to those soldiers and symptomatic of the borderline unhealthy emphasis American society places on our entertainment.

I'd explore that last point further but I’m up late on a work night writing a blog post that will be read by 150 people about a college football season I’ll be watching on TV.

These guys are not serious or knowledgeable about these subjects. That they are so confident in their assertions is warning in and of itself.

Actual Sportswriters
The Song: Lowdown (Boz Scaggs, 1976)

The Lyric:
Hey boy, you better bring the chick around
To the sad, sad truth
The dirty lowdown

Actual sportswriters took a hell of a licking this summer reporting the news as they learned it. The narrative that developed that they somehow wanted the season to be cancelled and were skewing their reporting to push it is so obviously wrong that it barely deserves mention, but I’ll bite. What possible reason would these individuals, who work in an industry that is far from financially stable to begin with, have to try and kill a season that provides their very livelihood? If they were to be laid off as a result, how likely are they to find similar work after the pandemic? Cui bono? Non ea. We might not like the news they report, but that doesn’t mean there’s always a hidden reasoning behind it.

I’m grateful for their dedication, for suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and happy that they will now have the opportunity to report on one of the craziest seasons we’ll ever experience.

Fans
The Song: Keep the Fire (Kenny Loggins, 1979)

The Lyric:

Believe the sun will rise with the dawn
That’s all you need to go on
But for tonight
Just keep the fire burning bright

We get to have a season, no matter how weird. Maybe we won’t get a full one. Who knows? Right now, December might as well be a decade away. Let’s enjoy what we have while we have it, and hope that everything turns out well. Someday things will be back to normal and we’ll all be able to tailgate together and sit on uncomfortable benches in the blazing hot August sun and bone-chilling November rain. Until then, keep the fire.

Players
The Song: Takin’ It To the Streets (The Doobie Brothers, 1976)

The Lyric:
You, telling me the things you’re gunna do for me
I ain’t blind and I don’t like what I think I see

The players stood up this year as a group in ways I haven’t seen before. I respect them for recognizing that they have a unique platform to bring awareness to racial injustice and privilege to groups who are often sheltered from it. They’ve simultaneously highlighted the complex but very real issue of college sports as a business for which they put in effort but receive limited compensation, and the world going forward will be different after this. And yes, even though I didn’t feel the decision should be made at the player’s level, they advocated for their season as well. They found a voice (really, several voices) this year, and I think we’ll all be better for it.

Sir Yacht
The Song: Sunny Hills (Bobby Caldwell, 1982)

The Lyric:
There’s nothing more to tell
We wish you a fond farewell
Maybe you’ll find someone you can talk to

I know someone who spent 14 straight years predicting Minnesota would beat Wisconsin. Every year it was exactly the same thing…Wisconsin is a paper tiger, this is the year they’re vulnerable, and if you don't believe it then you're part of the problem. Well, eventually it did, but when you’re 1 for 15 is that an accurate prediction or is it just the odds? Given an infinite amount of time, even the most low-probability event is likely to occur at least once.

In a long summer of non-stop prognostication and "insider" information Sir Yacht managed to be right about only one thing, and even then the details were wrong.

Anyway, this is a song about putting a troublesome relative away in a retirement home and never visiting them again.

OK friends, that’s it. Minnesota 38, Michigan 27. Row The Boat, Ski U Mah, Go Gophers!