2022 Minnesota Game Poster: Michigan State

Last season, I made 13 game "posters" over the course of the Gophers' season: basically, a piece of art for every game, parodying a video game and at times involving the opposing team. Goldy was the star of each. I felt better about some than I did others, but in general, I felt happy with this project.

By the time the season was over, I already had ideas for another set of posters for 2022. This time, each one would parody a famous album cover, or at least the cover of an album I hold in high regard. However, I was not mentally ready for such a project. I was tired. I wanted to go places and see friends. More than usual, I needed the offseason. And even when I wanted to think about football, I wanted to work on ideas for posts before another big art project. I completed nearly the whole set of regular season posters last year during the summer. This time, I got a few ideas written down, but by the time it was time to start writing previews, I didn't do any posters.

I still wanted to do a few this year, though. I decided not long after the New Mexico State game that I could make time to make some for the conference schedule. Probably not a poster for all nine, but at least one for each of the biggest handful of games. (Specifically, Illinois, Rutgers, and Northwestern are most iffy.) Whatever I'm able to work out — in addition to all the writing and data work I do for the actual football, I do have a "real" job, a social life, and the occasional wish to not devote every second of my free time to football-related thoughts.

The first appropriately big game on the schedule to deserve a poster is this week's matchup with Michigan State. The initial album cover idea involved matching the chronological order of each game on the schedule with a corresponding album within a given artist's career. So, for example, the New Mexico State game would be an artist's first LP, the Western Illinois game would be a different artist's second, and so on. I won't be sticking to that pattern for however many posters I make, but I will do so for this one. There were plenty of classic records to go with Game No. 4, but I settled on Talking Heads' Remain in Light.

And you may say to yourself: My God! What have I done?

Now, Remain in Light's cover is more iconic and striking than it is pretty. My parody of it therefore contains no more beauty, and probably has less, considering the appearance of previous Goldy iterations. I decided to use different versions of Goldy in place of the band because it seemed more suitable than using different players, coaches, or Sparty. The bottom left Goldy, from the 1950s, is probably the one that most resembles the ground squirrel Goldy is based on, but he is hardly lovable. Other pictures, in counter-clockwise order, come from the 80s, 90s, and the current day. I desaturated the modern Goldy's photo and gave them all a maroon tint.

The style of the cover, being so primitive by today's design standards, is not that hard to replicate in any program with a square brush. (I used GIMP.) There wasn't an ideal letter in "Golden Gophers" to flip like the A's in "Talking Heads," so I just flipped the three A's in "at Michigan State" at the bottom. Because the text looks so small, it looks a bit like "vt Michigvn Stvte, which I accept.