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.