Midweek Review: Minnesota 17-20 Wisconsin (OT)

Minnesota and Wisconsin fans would each rather their teams lose Paul Bunyan's Axe than not play at all, so regardless of the outcome Saturday, the fact the trophy was on the line at all for the 130th time felt like a gift. Maybe not a gift they should have gotten, considering the risks of playing any sport in a pandemic, but one that felt good to receive anyway.

In the end, however, the Badgers are the ones who won the Axe. It was a tight, at times ugly contest in which 14 of 23 possessions ended in either a punt or a field goal attempt. If Wisconsin had lost, the story of the game would have been about absent players (both new and held over from previous weeks) and an underperforming quarterback. Instead, it's about how Minnesota intentionally ran into a brick wall and couldn't take capitalize on their opponents' difficulties moving the ball.

Midweek Review: Minnesota 24-17 Nebraska

Minnesota's return from COVID-19-forced hiatus went better than expected. Despite all the holes in the Gophers' depth chart, they left Lincoln with a 24-17 win over Nebraska that elevates their record to 3-3 (and keeps the $5 Bits of Broken Chair Trophy in Minneapolis). It was an impressive but at times frustrating win that demonstrated each team's significant flaws and gave the victors hope that those flaws may have started to improve.

Midweek Review: Purdue 31-34 Minnesota

 1. The officials blew this game.

Just roll it.

I mean, this is just irredeemably bad. I have not seen a worse offensive pass interference decision, and I will likely die before seeing a worse offensive pass interference decision. Purdue fans should be livid. Jeff Brohm clearly was.

But hey — the Boilermakers had 52 seconds left and four downs within Minnesota territory. They had their chance to come back from this call and win in spite of it. It's not like the officials missed anything on Josh Aune's game-sealing intercep —

Ooheauuggghh.

Yeah, that's bad. I could point to an earlier phantom defensive pass interference call that saved what became a Purdue touchdown drive, and I can say the officiating was bad both ways (and it was), but there's not anything that will help. At the most important point of the game, Purdue got screwed. Twice. Though Minnesota had two timeouts and could have won anyway, that was no guarantee. Minnesota is beyond lucky to come out of this game the victors.

Midweek Review: Iowa 35-7 Minnesota

There's no sugarcoating, sidestepping, or excusing it: That game sucked.

Iowa dominated Minnesota on the ground and on defense, and the Floyd of Rosedale will stay south for a sixth straight year. The Gophers have one win at the halfway point of the abbreviated regular season, and they likely won't get more than a couple more by the end. No sane observer is questioning the program's direction or retroactively labeling its 2019 breakthrough as a fluke, but it is abundantly clear that in this moment, Minnesota is too inconsistent and too young to contend for a while.

Midweek Review: Minnesota 41-14 Illinois

The Gophers needed to bounce back against Illinois to get their season back on track, and they did so in a big way. While their 41-14 blowout win was against a shorthanded Illini team, and it did not totally alleviate concerns about Minnesota's flaws, it was the kind of Saturday that eased fans' anxieties and keeps Minnesota in the hunt for a high finish in the Big Ten West.

Midweek Review: Minnesota 44-45 Maryland

The Gophers' opener hinted that their defense would be a bigger problem than anticipated. Their second game indicated that it might be bad enough to wreck their season. Against a team that scored just three points in their first game, the Gophers' defense wasted a strong offensive performance by allowing 10.2 yards per play in a 44-45 overtime loss to hapless Maryland. It was a catastrophe that potentially forebodes more catastrophe, and it demands a postmortem.

Midweek Review: Michigan 49-24 Minnesota

Success, as P.J. Fleck said and graphed in his first season, does not always arrive on a perfectly linear path. It is also not guaranteed to maintain over time; it may fade, even partially, and only with time may it return to its previous heights.

A shorthanded and young Minnesota team demonstrated this fact by getting shellacked by Michigan Saturday, tempering some (perhaps overly) expectant fans' enthusiasm for the follow-up to the program's 2019 breakthrough. Poor run defense and a formidable Michigan front did them in, and the Little Brown Jug continues its residency in Ann Arbor.

Every Pass Tanner Morgan Threw in 2019

The Gophers' 2019 season was its best in more than half a century, and the biggest reason for that was their dangerous passing attack. Minnesota jumped from 40th in FBS in passing yards per attempt the year prior to 6th. Tyler Johnson and Rashod Bateman were both named First Team All-Big Ten receivers, with Johnson breaking a bundle of the program's single-season and career records and Bateman appearing on multiple All-America teams. Tanner Morgan had the most productive season ever for a Gophers quarterback, setting single-season program records for passing yards, touchdowns, and completion rate.

With a new season beginning in just weeks, it is a good time to reexamine and try to learn something from the passes Morgan threw in his breakout sophomore year.

Here, then, are all 318 of those passes.

Click on any image in this post to enlarge it.

Ranking Minnesota's 13 Uniform Combinations in 2019

We're all bored. In normal times, if the only sport we cared about was college football, we'd be overreacting spring games — or even spring practices — these days. Instead, the best we can do to consume the sport we love are things we'd be doing in June: reading predictive articles, speculating about transfer destinations, watching old games, and finding any kind of content to fill the void.

One of my sub-hobbies as a part of my sports fandom has for many years been the sport's aesthetics. Since I drew my first uniform concepts in elementary school, a lot of other people have caught onto this sub-hobby, too. Now, uniforms are a part of the business of college football; some teams wear something different every week to draw the attention of recruits.

In 2019, the Gophers were one of those teams. They wore 13 different uniform combinations in as many games. For content's sake, I present my reviews and rankings of those 13 combinations.

2020 Southwest Basketball Tournament

Not every person from Texas is born with a belief in Texan exceptionalism. Only most such persons are.

As a child growing up in the Metroplex, I believed in it. Though certain other aspects of my life and nascent worldview may have contradicted with that belief — family ties and sports allegiances to Minnesota; a distaste for Texas' largely bland rural areas; and a lifelong disconnect with the state's sizable population of rednecks (in some parts known as Aggies) — I still felt that I lived somewhere special.

From the time I first heard it, I have celebrated the (perhaps mythical) line from Davy Crockett's concession speech after losing an election in Tennessee: "You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas." The president was Texan. I didn't yet like Buddy Holly and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but so were they. Tex-Mex, Whataburger, Dr. Pepper, and the best barbecue are Texan. All of my friends were Texan. Texas Tech University, my parents' school, was in Texas. And Denton, my hometown, was in Texas. What a place this was.

I was Texan, but I was also a sports fan. With time, I discovered the NCAA Tournament and then college basketball video games. When I found the game mode that allowed you to play a 32- or 64-team tournament and pick the competitors, my brain quickly turned to the idea of an all-Texas tournament. However, I ran out of teams quickly. So I begrudgingly granted bids to teams from Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and even Oklahoma to complete the field.

I never played through a whole tournament, as I think the mere concept was always more alluring to me than the real possibility of Tech's run ending after two rounds because I wasn't very good at the game. But that concept stuck with me.

Two years ago, I brought that idea to this space, picking teams based on their RPI ranks. I chose venues in the five-state cluster based on overly ambitious minimum capacities (few arenas in Arkansas or New Mexico hold 9,000 or more people) and held regional finals in NBA arenas, which guaranteed that future editions of the exercise would boringly rotate between the same handful of places. And I went on a bit too long about the selection process when really, all anyone who read the post would have cared about was the bracket.

I changed a few things last year, using KenPom ranks instead and lowering the capacity threshold for the early rounds. And I spent a little less time droning.

This year, our only college basketball tournaments exist in our minds or digitally, whether in the archives of the internet, on the hard drives of gamers, or in hypotheticals about what might have been. Today, the real NCAA Tournament would have started. As a result, I felt compelled to put together this post earlier than normal and help try to fill the content void. I hope it is a noble effort.

Are Younger Soccer Players Worse Defenders?

I am a fan of Norwich City Football Club of the English Premier League. My fandom has waxed and waned over time for various reasons, but I make it a point to watch every Norwich match. It's a 2-hour chunk of my weekend, plus some supplementary reading on the side; it's not that great a commitment, and I like watching soccer.

Norwich are currently the last-place club in the Premier League. Since the start of the season, they have been favorites to be relegated, if not finish in that spot. That's what happens when you don't have the resources of other clubs in one of the top soccer leagues in the world.

Norwich also have a lot of intriguing young players: Fullbacks Max Aarons and Jamal Lewis, center back Ben Godfrey, and midfielders Todd Cantwell and Emi Buendía are each 23 years old or younger and making major contributions to a Premier League team.

The Canaries have struggled perhaps in part because of that youth. Their defense is one of the Premier League's worst; Norwich have allowed the most goals in the league. Likely the best member of their back four, center back Cristoph Zimmermann, is 27 years old. At least anecdotally, it seems like the club's inexperience and defensive struggles are linked. I wondered if this was the case and decided to test this hypothesis against available data from the Premier League this season.

In Review: Auburn 24-31 Minnesota

1. For the first time since the forward pass was legal, Minnesota won 11 games in a season.

P.J. Fleck's third season in charge of the Gophers was the program's best since at least 1967, when they last made the Rose Bowl. Though they fell short of Pasadena in 2019, an 11-2 finish with marquee wins over two brand-name programs shows how far Fleck has already taken Minnesota, as well as where he can take it from this point.

Conference politics are annoying, and the public's heavy reliance on bowl games to inform their opinions is not always logical, but the bottom line is that in college football, perception shapes reality. Programs need narratives on their side to continue to recruit well and to gain and maintain the faith of fans and boosters. Beating an opponent of Auburn's caliber, especially one that comes specifically from the SEC, carries tremendous weight. This win gives Minnesota a major boost of credibility.

This was a joyous season for Minnesota fans, and they should forever cherish its signature moments. But what determines the legacy of the 2019 Gophers — as a brilliant but brief moment, or as the start of something greater — is what comes next. Winning this game increases the chances that what comes next is just as good, if not better.