#0: Gopher football (Last Week: -Infinity). When I put last week's WMNSS to bed, I did know that the Minnesota Golden Gophers were likely going to receive a bowl invitation to a game around New Year's Day. Reflexively, I just threw them into -Infinity because, hey, they aren't in the College Football Playoff, so why write at all about this team until next season because they have a bowl exhibition coming up?
I should have pumped the brakes on that decision. On Sunday negotiations revealed that the U. will be playing Missouri in the Florida Citrus (formerly Tangerine ... is that right?) Bowl on New Year's Day. Even though this is only an announcement, and even though this was a very good week for Twin Cities teams overall, I in fact am giving this survey's top spot to a team that didn't play a down this week. For even though this game doesn't truly matter, this is the first time Minnesota will be playing in a bowl on January 1 since beating (?) UCLA in the Rose Bowl way back in 1962.
The bowl that they got into matters. Not just the caliber, which usually is denoted by the date. I have heard a couple of people (one on the radio, on at My Favorite Stripclub [Non-Cover Division] reminisce) about the times where they would wake up New Year's Day and know that there would be bowl games to watch all day. That's true these days too, but back then there were the same bowls on January 1, the traditional bowls, the "real" bowls, like the Orange, and Sugar, and Cotton. These days the bowl season is littered with, no joke, bowls that have corporate tie-ins that were signed this year, bowls like the Bitcoin Bowl, and the TaxSlayer Bowl (Tennessee seems really excited to be going to that -- too excited), and the Restless Leg Syndrome Bowl (I think I made the last one up, I think). Although the Tangerine/Florida Citrus Bowl isn't in the Rose/Sugar/Orange/Fiesta/Cotton echelon of "important" bowls, it is in the next tier, bowls including the Gator and the Sun, those that have never attracted the top matches year-after-year but have been around (and been successful) for decades. That is the kind of bowl Minnesota is going to this year. Even more notable, it's the kind of bowl Minnesota has not been to in more than half a century. But they are now. And for that, I have to give my due deference. Well done, Jerry Kill & Co.
#-1: Gopher women's hockey (Last Week: -2). It's weird, isn't it? Both the women's and men's hockey programs began conference play this weekend ... and then take a month off for Winter Break before playing again. (Moreover, their first games coming back on the ice aren't conference games.) That doesn't seem right, you know? Why not start conference play after the New Year so you can play conference games at a regular schedule straight through? I guess they've thought of this before, but I can't think that the arrangement they have now is better.
Rant over. I give the runner-up spot to the ladies hockey team because they dick-smacked St. Cloud St. at home last weekend by scores of 12-0 and 7-0. I appreciate the inroads women's hockey is making at the college level, but like at the Olympic level, there isn't enough talent to make talented games beyond, oh, the top dozen programs in the country. And St. Cloud St. ain't one of them. Hannah Brandt scored two goals and seven assists; Kelly Pannek chipped in with half a dozen; both of them had six helpers in Friday's immolation of the Huskies. As such, both of them were lauded by the WCHA (as, respectively, Offensive Player and Rookie Of The Week).
They pick up their seven-game homestand about a month from now against St. Lawrence, a very special, and a very weird, Sunday-Tuesday two-game series.
#-2: Gopher wrestling (Last Week: 0). OK, last week, I said I wouldn't write about them. But then I saw that there is a team aspect to this Cliff Keen Invitational in Las Vegas, and the U. won that for the first time since 2008, so I am going to write about them after all. I just don't know how good the tournament really was if second place (a distant second place, by the way) was Ohio St. Neverthelss, shout-outs go to titlists Chris Dardanes and Dylan Ness.
Unlike the hockey programs, the grapplers still play this year. They host Northwestern, but that's on the 18th.
#-3: Gopher men's basketball (Last Week: -1). Pad that resume and keep the boosters happy, Richard Pitino. They are in thick of the meatball portion of their schedule, crushing Western Carolina 84-64 and North Dakota 92-56 this week. By the way, both were at home, and so I wonder why they don't venture out and play a road game against a pancake. Guess they have nothing to gain from that; they'd be embarrassed if they lost, and they would be criticized for beating up on a weakling if they won. But I don't see how they aren't, for lack of a better word, bullying non-major programs by paying them to come over to Williams Arena and get their asses kicked. If the NCAA Committee somehow readjusted the Ratings Percentage Index so to encourage (or at least to not penalize) major teams from playing non-majors on the road, I think you'd see more teams take the risk of playing true road games against programs that could use the visibility of hosting a big name.
Just a thought. They host Southern as part of their six-game homestand Wednesday night (tonight).
#-4: Vikings (Last Week: -3). A thrilling win, yet I should have tempered my belief that the Vikings were going to walk all over a demoralized Jets team. Maybe the Jets aren't that demoralized; maybe the players are still willing to fight for Head Coach Rex Ryan. Or, maybe it's also that the Vikings aren't a really good team. Matt Kalil committed a couple bad penalties and was totally fooled on a stunt that led to that Jets safety. Cordarrelle Patterson, meanwhile, remains a non-entity, while street free agent Charles Johnson remains the club's main receiving target.
On the plus side, The Education Of Teddy Bridgewater continues (to use a phrase the Gopher football team employed as its motto for the year [and whose stadium the Vikings are using for this and next year]) brick by brick. A sign that he is building a foundation? I was working the game on Sunday. Afterward, during our post-work meal, one of the guys who was also covering the game said that that game-winning play in Overtime, that bubble screen to Jarius Wright that went 80-plus yards, was an audible from Bridgewater. He saw something, opted for something safer, and look what happened. OK, so maybe he didn't believe that his play was going to result in a Touchdown. But there are worse things than diagnosing a defensive formation and successfully doing something about it.
With that victory the squad has eclipsed the five wins from last year. It appears that this team is going to go 7-9 -- No Man's Land when it comes to getting prime picks in next year's draft. But from where we thought this team was going to be at the beginning of this season, I am kind of encouraged. Now to find a receiving corps and an offensive line. Meanwhile, one of the losses (possibly ... OK, probably) comes Sunday (in the late afternoon; that might be a surprise for some of you) at Detroit.
#-5: Gopher women's basketball (Last Week: -4). They bring up the rear of the teams that went undefeated this week because they had to scramble to beat Butler at the Barn in OT Sunday night. The Gophers were up by ten halfway through the second half, but they actually were down to the Bulldogs until Rachel Banham drained a three-pointer with 4.9 seconds left in regulation to tie the game. She dropped 35 points in that game and drained five threes, giving her the school record for most threes in her career.
Tonight (Wednesday night) they are in Grand Forks, N.D. to play North Dakota. What, do the basketball programs have a package deal with UND?
#-6: Gopher men's hockey (Last Week: -6). One gets the feeling that at 9-4-1, this program is underachieving. Case in point: This week's conference-opening series at Michigan St. On Friday they crushed the Spartans 5-0. But on Saturday Goalie Adam Wilcox had to stop 42 shots in order to preserve a 3-all tie, a game they eventually would lose in a shootout -- not technically a loss, but a loss in my book. So they are mired (and I think that is an accurate term) in sixth in the polls because other teams have been better more consistently.
They are done till just after the New Year, when they face Merrimack and then either the winner of Massachusetts-Lowell or the Rochester Institute of Technology in the 24th Annual Mariucci Classic. Merrimack? UMass-Lowell? RIT? I don't think these guys are going to give the Goofs a bump in the PairWise Rankings, if you know what I mean.
#-7: Wild (Last Week: -5). Lost at home to Anaheim. Almost lost at home to the New York Islanders, possibly the surprise team in the National Hockey League. I was listening to the game but had to shut it off after the Mild trailed at the end of the first period 3-0.
It was around that time that the Islanders's Matt Martin drove the Wild's Keith Ballard into the red dasher. Ballard not only fell on the ice, he started to convulse and gasp for air. Now that's scary.
It took a very scary injury for the Mild to finally stop being mild. They trailed 4-1 after two periods before scoring four times in the third for a 5-4 victory. It's the first time in Mild history they've won in regulation after being down 3-0. However, it's the third time in four games (and second in a row) where they have gone down 3-0 at home. Moreover, Minnesota had a 3-0 on this same Islanders squad last December and choked it away. There is a stupor going on with this club. It may have to do with the river of mumps that took out Ryan Suter for a while. But this team now has a problem with starting out slow, real slow, especially at the Xcel Energy Center.
They are on the road this screening week: San Jose, Arizona and Chicago.
#-8: Timberwolves (Last Week: -7). OK, so it looks like the guts of this time might be in traction for a lot longer than I previously thought. Ricky Rubio probably won't come back until after the New Year, and there is no solid timetable on when Nikola Pekovic will return. Kevin Martin should come back sooner, but I don't know when.
That means that there are rookies and retreads populating this team. It's a baptism by fire, in particular, for Zach LaVine, thrust into being the primary Point Guard when he would ideally be under the tutelage of Rubio. He may or may not know what he's doing, but defeats to Houston, San Antonio and Golden State show that he isn't an instant game-changer. (They were close against the Rockets, though, I'll give the Woofie Dogs that.) Slumping through a six-game losing streak, they host The Bastard Seattle SuperSonics and The Bastard Minneapolis Lakers before going to Our Nation's Capital on Tuesday.
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