Sorry, guys, but this survey is going to have to be terse. I got back from a party where I whipped it out, and once I got home I watched The Taste finale and some overtime basketball action between Middle Tennessee St. and Old Dominion, then I was so exhausted I took a nap. And now I have less than half an hour to bang this out and get my blog post in for the day. So here goes:
#-1: Gopher women's hockey (Last Week: -2). Back to their winning ways after beating the piss out of Minnesota State-Mankato (which has all of two wins, none of them in the WCHA) last weekend by a combined score of 14-4. Maryanne Menefee scored four of those goals in the home-and-home sweep and is the conference Offensive Player Of The Week. Still solidly in second in the polls behind Boston College with no first-place votes. This weekend they play St. Cloud St., which, surprisingly, will be two games on the road and not a home-and-home.
#-2: Gopher wrestling (Last Week: 0). For the top-ranked team in the nation (so I've heard), this squad has been living on the edge a lot. Take their 20-19 victory over then-#9 Illinois. At 133, Chris Dardanes, top-ranked wrestling at that weight, was trailing the Fighting Illini's Zane Richards (ranked fifth in the country) 7-1 heading into the third and final period. But he reeled off four takedowns in the final minute of play to tie the match at 10-all to force overtime. There it took only 39 seconds for Dardanes to take down Richards one final time to take the match 12-10. They needed all of those points; Illinois wound up the dual (the one Dardanes won was the seventh) with a fall and a technical fall to make it a very close one-point victory.
Is this team vulnerable? They face two-time defending champion Penn St. at State College Sunday afternoon.
#-3: Gopher women's basketball (Last Week: -4). Another club living on the edge. They seem to play better on the road, as evidenced by a 76-72 victory over Ohio St. Thursday in which they were leading (albeit by not many) pretty much the whole game. But it took a steal followed by a lay-in from Carlie Wagner off an inbounds pass for the Golden Gophers to come back and defeat Indiana Sunday afternoon, 65-61. Then on Thursday night their fortune ran out; with both Wagner and Zahui fouling out, they were able to once again come back against Purdue to tie the game at regulation, only to give up a Boilermaker lay-up in the final seconds to lose in OT, 90-88. This may hurt their chances of hosting a regional as a top-16 seed come NCAA time. This week they travel to Rutgers and host Penn St.
#-4: Gopher men's hockey (Last Week: -6). I read in a chat thread about Arizona St. becoming a Division I program that some were razzing Wisconsin for being the very worst team in the Pairwise. That's the reason I'm throwing the Goofer men's hockey team down here: They lost to the Badgers on Friday by coughing up a 2-0 lead with a pair of goals about two minutes apart midway through the third period. Well, it goes into the books as a tie, but they lost in a shootout, therefore it's a loss. They came back to rout Wisconsin 5-2 in a game that ended with an all-out brawl. Vinni Lettieri came out of the bench to join the scrum and has been suspended a game ... which happens to be the squad's semifinal match of the second annual North Star College Cup at the Xcel Energy Center ... which happens to be against the #1 team in the country, MSU-Mankato (which is enjoying its first-ever stay at the top). Very weird to see the Gophs as an underdog. If they win this, they face either Minnesota-Duluth or Bemidji St.
#-5: Wild (Last Week: -Infinity). Well, the Devan Dubnyk Era as the Mild's savior last two games. They were two wins, over Buffalo and Arizona. But then they got throttled at home by Columbus, then lost in a shootout in Detroit (a game in which, to their credit, they managed to tie with three goals in the third period to force a 4-4 extra session). These guys aren't going to the playoffs, are they? At Western Canada (Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver), then home to Chicago.
#-6: Gopher men's basketball (Last Week: -5). Christ, it's getting close. They won their first conference game Saturday at home against Rutgers (a day in which the T-Wolves, Wild and Gopher men's hockey all won -- I call it Miracle Saturday!), but lost a close one at Nebraska where they had three chances to sink a three-pointer to tie the game and force OT. Host Illinois Saturday afternoon.
#-7: Timberwolves (Last Week: -3). They did beat Denver -- on the road, too. But sandwich that with blowout losses to Phoenix, Charlotte and Dallas, and who cares? This week: Hosting New Orleans, at red-hot Atlanta and OKC, then home to Boston.
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