The Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey

#-1: Lynx (Last Week: -3).  In virtually the flipside to what had happened previous WMNSSs, every single team here lost at least one game.  So I give the top spot back to the Jynx, who finished the regular season with a 2-1 week and clinched home-court advantage throughout the WNBA Playoffs with a convincing 79-66 win at home over the Chicago Sky in the last game of the year Saturday night.  Because of the subjectivity of foul calls and the potential points a team gets from them, the influence of a home crowd is more important in basketball than it is in any other sport.  Sure, it didn't help the Jynx when they had the best record in the league and lost both a WNBA Finals home game and the title to the Indiana Fever last year, but it's much better to have it than to not have it.

However I will give a prediction: They lose in the Western Conference Finals to the Los Angeles Farmers Sparks.  They lost the season series to L.A. 3-2, after losing the penultimate game of the regular season by a point, 85-84 Thursday.  Oh, sure, both teams held court and thus the Lynx only lost because they had to play in L.A. three times.  Still that does not bode well, and it's always better to underestimate than to overestimate.

They begin the playoffs with a best-of-three series against the Seattle, whom they crushed in Seattle Tuesday 73-60.  The Storm grabbed the fourth seed in the Western Conference despite finishing with a losing record.  Seattle will not be a problem.  L.A., and potentially Chicago, will be.

#-2: Gopher football (Last Week: -1).  I agree with Jim Souhan for the most part; if the seizures continue, I believe Jerry Kill has to step down as head couch of this team.  It's not necessarily because of his epilepsy, although have seizures during three games so far into his tenure here is getting to be ridiculous.  We were told by Kill himself that with hydration and a calm demeanor, there would be no seizures.  Being a head coach doesn't help with the latter, and it's apparent that he's not doing enough of the former or else who wouldn't be having these seizures.  It did not help, by the way, that in today's press conference Kill refused to answer questions about his health, even though Minnesota taxpayers fund his million-dollar salary and have witnessed his illness on the sidelines three times now.

Guess whether he remains Head Coach depends on what it always depends on: Wins and losses.  Beating Western Illinois is a plus, even though they're a second-division team.  Let's see what happens, on the field and on the sidelines, early Saturday afternoon at Das Bank vs. San Jose St.

(By the way, I have never seen a newspaper editor undercut her high-profile columnist the way Star Tribune editor Nancy Barnes did when she apologized on behalf of the paper for Souhan's column -- and on an online journalism blog, no less.  If I were Souhan, I'd be pissed off enough to quit ... and if I then were Barnes, I'd breathe a sigh of relief that I was able to cut another person's salary out of the paper's shrinking budget.)

#-3: Gopher soccer (Last Week: -4).  Well, it had to happen: The team suffered their first loss of the season at then-ninth-ranked Florida 2-0.  They then completed the non-con part of their sched by beating host Jacksonville 3-0.  So they begin Big Ten play with a 7-1 record, even though I have no idea how that will stand up to other teams' resumes when it comes time to picking a field for the NCAA Tournament.  They start conference play at Indiana Saturday.

#-4: Gopher volleyball (Last Week: -2).  Well, this also had to happen, but since this was a Top 5 team, a loss to a worse squad (albeit a ranked Kentucky club) is, in my opinion, a sign of trouble.  They handled their business in the first game of the Bluegrass Battle when they swept Louisville Friday night (all eight of their wins are by 3-0 scores).  But just couldn't put the Wildcats away in the clutch in that final set.  So, yes, I wonder about how good this team really is.

Apparently they will complete the non-con portion of their sched by playing four teams (Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Dartmouth) over two days this weekend in the Hanover, N.H. Dartmouth Tournament.

#-5: Twins (Last Week: -5).  A 2-5 week with a four-game losing streak thrown in, blah-blah-blah, when is this fucking season over so I don't have to write about them anymore?  They complete the road part of their regular season schedule at the White Sox and Oakland (watch your head; I hear pieces of the infrastructure are falling down) before they turn and head for home, aka the last week of the regular season, starting with Detroit on Monday.

#-6: Vikings (Last Week: -6).  The stat: Out of the 190 teams that started a season 0-2, only 22 of them made the playoffs.  Now that includes the New York Giants team that won the Super Bowl the year they won that, but the Vikes are not those G-Men.

I fell asleep just before halftime of the ViQueens' game against Chicago and woke up just after Cordarrelle Patterson fumbled the ball on the kickoff with two seconds left in the game.  I heard it got really good in the second half, but I had just spent 14 3/4 hours in a house in Summit Ave. in St. Paul as an extra for a movie, and my biological clock is still out of whack.  I should blog about that.  Anyway, it seems as if Christian Ponder saved his bacon again, but that the final offensive and defensive drives were total fuck-ups.  The final three plays at the Bears' doorstep, where a touchdown would turn a three-point lead to a two-possession game with about three minutes to go, where two Adrian Peterson runs sandwiched around an incomplete pass.  No play-action?  I understand if the coaches don't trust Ponder, but in a situation like this, you're going to have to hand the ball and the gameplan to him; if he fucks up, you have even more ammo in which to bench him.  And then apparently there was confusion in the fourth-to-the-last and the last defensive plays of the game, which resulted in a touchdown and a 31-30 defeat.  I guess I should be heartened that both defeats this season have been close with should-could-woulda moments.  But at the end of the day, you are what your record says you are.

I'll be going to Sunday's home opener against Cleveland.  First to break 18 wins.