Big 10 Football: Trying to Have Some Perspective
I’m a Michigan grad and so I found myself wailing, “Our season is OVER!” following Saturday’s season opening 34-32 loss to Appalachian State (who?).
Then I read this at 10,000 Takes:
All [Michigan coach Lloyd] Carr has done since 1995 is win a NCAA National Championship, five Big Ten titles and several bowl games. If someone would ever do that at Minnesota we would build him a pyramid overlooking Lake Minnetonka and embalm his cats in preparation for his ascendance to the afterlife.
…I wonder what it is like to have such expectations. We can only hope that someday the Gophers are ranked #5 in the country so we can be outraged if something like this ever happens at TCF Field.
So what this really means is we’ve now lost our chance at a national championship. Best case scenario, we win out, win the Big Ten, and go to the Rose Bowl. For us, an 8-4 season is all but a failure. 9-3? 10-2? We better at least win our bowl game.
You know, Tom Linneman, you are so right. So thank you, Gophers, for making this Wolverine feel better.
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The Gopher football team used to be the biggest sports deal in town, until the early ’60s, once the Twin Cities had gotten its first two major-league pro teams: The Twins and the Vikings. Those teams soared in popularity during that decade, and that coincided with the beginning of the long drought that the Gophers have been stuck in ever since.
The Gophers were a national powerhouse during parts of the ’30s and ’40s, plus the early ’60s, winning several national championships.
To be fair, in the Big Ten Conference the Gophers and Northwestern are the only two teams that have this big disadvantage: they’re located within a major metropolitan area, which means there are many other sports teams for spectators to instead follow; the rest of the Big Ten teams are the lone big-sports-fish-in-a-small-sports-pond in their areas. So it’s not surprising that the Gophers struggle to keep up with most of the rest of the Big Ten.
Ann Arbor is about 40 minutes from Detroit. I’d drive an equal distance to get from my parents’ house to where the Pistons and Shock play. So I have to disagree with you there. Both Michigan and Michigan State draw extremely well for football, MSU for basketball, and both for hockey with both teams also playing a game here and there in Detroit.
If Gopher football was any good I think they’d draw just fine. The hockey team usually fills up Mariucci, doesn’t it?
This is a hockey town when it comes to the U.
I’m hoping there’s more interest with the new stadium with a better atmosphere. the metrodome is crappy for college games.
This is a hockey town when it comes to the U.
I’m hoping there’s more interest with the new stadium with a better atmosphere. the metrodome is crappy for college games.
The Metrodome is a crappy stadium period, but it sucks even more for the Gophers to play there.
Skip past the question of whether athletics are valuable to the university and whether or not athletes get away with shit they’re not supposed to and how the stadium got paid for. (I know, I know.)
Thinking about sports in terms of the history and tradition, it really blows for the Gophers to play in the Metrodome because there is no sense of history or tradition. I can’t imagine playing in the Dome feels at all like “this is our house” to the players or the fans. I’d want to walk into a football game and see Maroon and Gold and memorabilia and team photos and all that stuff everywhere.
Apparently, no one had heard before Saturday, but Appalacian has always been HOT HOT HOT…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bydm2hBqPHI&mode=related&search=
I could have lived without seeing that.
Football is the toughest college sport to have success with, because of the great expense, which has to do with the huge numbers of players and coaches needed, as well as all of the necessary equipment and facilities.
Even dinky schools can achieve big-time success in a lower-cost sport like basketball, where you don’t need many players and coaches. But not in football.
It takes a lot of money to build a top-notch football program. It involves getting a big-time, highly-paid, coach and his staff. . . . and having state-of-the-art facilities. Without an impressive coaching staff, impressive facilities, and impressive attendance, a school isn’t going to be able to recruit many top-notch players. A lot of the best Minnesota high school players choose to go elsewhere, like other Big Ten schools, or Notre Dame.
In the mid-’80s the Gophers finally had a big-name coach: Lou Holtz, previously at Arkansas. He whipped up a lot of enthusiasm here, which shook loose the needed money for improved practice facilities and such. But within a couple of years he jilted Minnesota for a much better gig: Notre Dame.
The Gopher’s old stadium, built in the 1920s, was horseshoe-shaped, with a brick exterior wall. 63 rows high. (I know, because in college a campus job of mine was to sweep from the top down to the bottom.) At the open end of the horseshoe there were wooden bleachers. A running track encircled the football field; that’s where the U’s track-and-field events took place until a separate facility was built, 30-some years ago.
When the Metrodome was nearly ready to open, the Gopher football program had been in the doldrums for nearly 20 years. So it was just too tempting to move games to the Metrodome, to inject some novelty interest for the long-suffering fans. (Not to mention more comfortable conditions for spectators: lots of season-ticket holders would be no-shows on cold and rainy days at the old stadium; understadable, considering how poorly the Gopher teams were during those years.)
Also, When the Metrodome opened the old Gopher stadium was nearly 60 years old; it was going to be requiring a considerable investment of money to keep it in shape for the ensuing decades. So that factor made it that much easier to abandon the old stadium and shift the focus to the Metrodome. (The stadium was left to sit, mostly unused, for the better part of the 1980s, before being razed. In retrospect, it now looks silly, as a new on-campus stadium is being built, that the old on-campus stadium was given up on.)
In the old days, a nice feature of football game-days was the U of M marching band parading down University Ave., from Dinkytown, along fraternity fow, to the stadium. That sort of feeling of course was lost once games moved to the Metrodome.