Consider this an advance on the MNWSS that should be out Thursday. Every single University of Minnesota winter sport -- men's and women's basketball, men's and women's hockey, and wrestling -- will be tied for -infinity, and I just have to say how pissed off I am at the way every single program there ended. All five them are a big collective FAIL.
I have a rule in the survey that any team gets a -infinity if their season ends without a championship. But I have no idea how I would separate any of these five teams if I had to pick out which was the worst. If you put a gun to my head, I will say that the team that comes out the best probably is the women's basketball team because they made it to the NCAA tournament and won/upset Notre Dame (in a pod played at South Bend). But then tonight they had to really choke the bit in being eliminated to Texas A&M. It's great they exceeded expectations, but damn, they lost 73-42. And the final margin of defeat was one less than the number of turnovers they had (and they gave out 16 in the first half and 16 in the second half). Plus, the Lady Aggies had 20 steals -- 20! That stat alone shows the team had a outsized lack of poise. What am embarrassing way to end your season, geez. ...
All the others committed sins that are inexcusable. The women's hockey team had rivals over the season, both of them in their own conference (UMD and eventual champ Wisconsin), but they were ranked 1st more weeks in the poll than any other team. They won their first-round game, but got caught in the semi-finals 5-4 to Mercyhurst, which is a good team but in no way should have beaten the Lady Gophers, and I don't care that Mercyhurst was seeded third and Minnesota second. Too often this team came up short against the teams that supposedly were their fiercest opponents, and one of those teams sealed their fate.
In two short years, wrestling has gone from a valuable non-revenue program the U. can hang their hat on to a program that is not keeping up with the Iowas and Iowa States of the world. They were also-rans at the NCAA Champsionships, finishing 14th (haven't checked on whether there are only 14 wrestling programs in Division I). They had only three games gunning for individual titles, and the best came in third. Hell, some guy from Arizona State who only has one leg came in third! (And a hell of a story that is, huh?) The future of the direction of this program -- and of coach J Robinson -- needs to be evaluated.
The men's b-ball team ... well, they're getting Royce White next year, so things are looking up. But for a team that had some talent playing in a conference that wasn't that good (although Michigan State and Purdue are representin' in the Big Dance), they were way too inconsistent. Moreover, they couldn't score. Just harken back to the Texas game. Yes, A.J. Abrams buried the Gophs for good with his three-pointers, including five consecutive. But with a little more than four minutes left in the game and the U. down by 8 or so, the vibe you got from TV announcers Jim Nantz and Clark Kellogg was that it was over. Hell, Villanova was coming back from 8 points down to American and they did it in less than four minutes. It's possible. But everyone assumed that Minnesota was done. And they were right. Add some scoring pop to Tubby's better-than-average defense, and this team is one on the rise.
So what to do about the men's hockey team? I'm vacillating between canning Coach Don Lucia and giving him leeway because this program did win back-to-back championships not too long ago. But this team, the big school in the State Of Ha-Kee, will not be playing in the tournament for the first time since 2000. This pathetic end came due to three events: a 2-1 loss to UMD in the Final Five Play-In Game last weekend; a subsequent tie in a third-place game between Princeton and St. Lawrence in the ECAC playoffs; and Boston University just getting past Cinderella UMass-Lowell in the Hockey East championship. Somehow, these conspired to leave the Gophs out of the tourney. This is not needlessly complicated, like the BCS; they did this to themselves, whether it's blue-chippers wanting to stay in the program only for a season to showcase themselves to NHL scouts, Lucia losing his touch (and his thumb on the pulse of this team for a couple weeks to fight some mysterious infection), Alex Kangas not rising to the occasion, or the state's conspicuous inability to develop good goalies in the high-school level. As I heard on KFAN this morning, Minnesota has built-in advantages because of who we are, where we are, and how we feel about hockey. This should be unacceptable. And I don't know if this is a temporary blip or indicative of an oncoming landslide to complete disarray.
Good riddance, U. winter sports?
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