Positive Numbers: Gopher volleyball (Last Week: Positive Numbers). OK, it's possible that this four-game phalanx has forged their resolve, but shit, these ladies need to stop it with these five-set matches! I attended the season finale/Senior Night game Saturday vs. Wisconsin, and I though they were done after they gave up on Set 3. No, they literally gave up on Set 3. Head Coach Hugh McCutcheon brought in a little-used player (and a Senior) in the middle of the set, thereby signaling to his team and to everyone in the sold-out Sports Pavilion that they wouldn't fight the set. They lost it at 11, and I swear I have never seen a Gopher volleyball team lose a set 25-11.
At that point I really thought the grind of facing great team after great team willing to take their best shots at them finally caught up to them. And I was not as pissed as I thought I would be. Their place in the NCAA Tournament was assured; so was their top-4 overall seed and the right to host to the Final Four. And I still believe that these sets add up; another five-setter, and they're liable to get upset in an early round just because they're pooped.
Well, positively spinning this as a test where their character was exposed as strong, the Gophers fought back to take the last two sets and win the match in five. It turns out that the Badgers were in fact the tired ones; they lost Set 4 at 17 and the Set 5 at 8. They are now on a ten-game winning streak (longest in the country, I think) and finished with an undefeated record at home (for the second year in a row) and the #1 spot in the AVCA Top 25.
As you could tell, the postseason season-long laurels came in waves. Senior Middle Blocker Hannah Tapp was named All-B1G. Samantha Seliger-Swenson joined Tapp and was named conference Setter Of The Year. And joining both of them as All-Conference and being named Big Ten Player Of The Year (as well as receiving Big Ten Player Of The Week and AVCA National Player Of The Week) is Eden Prairie's own Sarah Wilhite. Holy shit, this player is a beast. She dug a career-high 25 times in that out-of-nowhere comeback against Nebraska and hit .377 against Wisconsin. And Wilhite is a prime contender for National Player Of The Year.
The Gophers, despite the gauntlet they passed through the past two weeks, was only the #2 overall seed in the tournament. #1? Nebraska. But they just beat them!!! Moreover, the pod they're hosting this weekend is a bit tougher than it seems. After probably dispatching with the North Dakota Fighting Hawks (whose Assistant Coach is a blast from the past for Minnesota v-ball fans: Mia Tabberson) tonight (Friday night), they will face in the second round Saturday night one of two blueblood programs that had a rough year: My alma mater or Hawai'i (who has, as an Assistant Coach, another Gopher great, Lindsay Berg, aka The Mighty Axe!). A quick scan on chatrooms forms a consensus where the U.'s second-round match might be the most difficult in the bracket.
I want to watch this weekend. Or, I don't. On the one hand, I have no doubt that Minnesota will win both rounds and thus have the right to host again next weekend. This squad is so good that I initially didn't want to spend money seeing them sweep two patsies. But then I see on Twitter that my alma mater has been shipped here, and so now I feel obligated to watch their match, which starts at 4:30, when I'm still at work. Then, I see on the Gophers ticket website that tickets are sold out. Sold out??? It's the first time I've ever seen tournament games at the Pav sold out. So now that relieves me of my angst; can't regret missing a game that I couldn't buy a ticket to. But now ... yeah, I'm obligated to at least try to get a ticket. I don't know how or where to look, but I need to exhaust all my avenues. And then I have to boogie out of work a tad early to make sure I see my alma mater before it's over. Hope to Buddha they don't get, egads, swept.
#-1: Gopher men's hockey (Last Week: -4). You'll notice that I skipped #0. I think I've done this before, although not in a long, long time. It's just that, well, every other team has lost at least one game, and moreover, those defeats are a further sign of how mediocre all of them are. I just didn't feel like artificially lifting one of those teams to the neutral digit just because there is one local team that is playing lights-out.
Even with that decision I am having trouble deciding who should be second. In the end I decided to go with the male icers of Dinkytown. Choking on a 4-2 third-period lead by coughing up four straight goals, like they did Friday at Northeastern, is really bad. But the team rebounded with a 4-2 victory Sunday over Boston College. That was Don Lucia's 700th win as a Head Coach, #421 leading the Gophers. Moreover, the then-and-still-11th-ranked U. upset the Eagles, which were either ranked third our fourth, depending on which poll you look at, on the road. That was the deciding factor.
The team has two more weekends of non-conference play. But this weekend starts Big Ten action; they host Ohio St. for a pair.
#-2: Gopher men's basketball (Last Week: 0). Like the team above, the male b-ball team also split its screening week. They outlasted Southern Illinois by a dozen points at The Barn but, in their first match away from home, got grounded down by Florida St., 75-67, in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge for their first loss of the year. From this report from the Seminoles PR side, the game, especially the hour-long first half, was a foul-ridden slog. (When you have the partisan crowd chanting, "Let them play," the foremost thing on its mind certainly wasn't booing the Gophers.) Still, that the team lost in its first game away from home doesn't bode well for their next game, a neutral-site contest Saturday vs. Vanderbilt in, of all places, Sioux Falls, S.D. However, they can escape back home after that for six straight games that end their non-con sched and opens their B1G sched. The fast of that stretch is Tuesday, when NJIT (that's the New Jersey Institute of Technology) comes to town.
#-3: Wild (Last Week: -5). On last Friday they swept the defending Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins and how, 6-2. They then lost in a Shootout in St. Louis the next night. They then screwed the pooch on a two-goal lead in the second period in Vancouver by allowing the Canucks to score four straight, staged a comeback with two goals to tie it, then lost in regulation, 5-4, after a deflected shot off a skate weened past a shitty Darcy Kuemper. That got Head Coach Bruce Boudreau so pissed off after the loss that he scheduled an extra practice in a run-down arena where The Bastard Atlanta Flames played in a couple of years before the Saddledome was built for them. Will it work? Who knows. All I know is the Mild will be travelling all around Canada this week: The aforementioned Flames, Edmonton, Toronto.
#-4: Timberwolves (Last Week: -7). One dude on Twitter is amazed at all the young individual talent on display in the National Basketball Association. That may be true, but for the Woofie Dogs, that isn't translating into a team. They outlasted the Suns, 98-85, in Phoenix. But despite a furious comeback led by Karl-Anthony Towns dropping a career-high 47 points and hauling in 18 rebounds, they fell to the New York Knicks at home, 106-104. That was preceded by defeats at Golden State and home to Utah. So they're on a three-game losing streak, already the club's third this young season. And yet we are told to wait by b-ball sabermatricians for the youngsters to develop.
Tonight (Friday night) they finish their home-and-home with the Knicks in Madison Square Garden. They go to Charlotte the next night. They quickly go home to play San Antonio Tuesday before playing in Toronto Thursday.
#-5: Gopher wrestling (Last Week: -2). Oh, shit. The Post-Robinson Era has already started with a humiliation. Sunday afternoon the #1 team in the country, Oklahoma St., came to the Pav and utterly destroyed the Goofer grapplers, 34-3, ouch! The team won only one match. That winner, Brett Pfarr, was somehow named Conference Wrestler Of The Week. Does that make any sense?
This is a very, very bad sign of things to come. Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted. The Cliff Keen this week, so I probably will drop these guys off the survey next week.
#-6: Vikings (Last Week: -6). Well, shit. I know they were going to lose last (Thursday) night to the Dallas Cowboys, and they did. But I thought it was going to be a blowout, like 50-10. In fact it was 19-17. And the ViQueens were actually in it; they led for a cup of coffee in the third quarter. But, well, Vikes gonna Vikes, and now they've lost six-of-seven and are, indeed wailing and failing.
The injuries keep piling up. Safety Harrison Smith was seen leaving the locker room with crutches. T.J. Clemmings ... well, he's not injured, he just really sucks. And now the injuries include the Head Coach. Mike Zimmer suffered a detached retina -- what the fuck??? -- and had emergency eye surgery. He might be out at least a couple weeks. Stepping in as Interim Head was the Special Teams Coordinator, Mike Preifer; the thinking was that he was familiar with both sides of the ball, and in the meantime Offensive Coordinator Pat Shurmur and Defensive Coordinator George Edwards can continue doing their Xs and Os. Well, it didn't work. But maybe nothing is going to work this season if the fucking HC is hurt.
The only saving grace, as point out by the Trump supporter in my alumni club, is that the stretch run features four games that, on paper, still seem winnable: At Jacksonville, home to Indianapolis, at Green Bay, home to Chicago. Unfortunately, this team may be even less than than the sum of their parts. But at least they'll have ten days to devise a plan to turn away from the abyss.
#-7: Gopher women's basketball (Last Week: -3). Um, this is not going well. A pair of 14-point losses to ACC schools, North Carolina (in the second game of the Junkanoo Jam tournament in the Bahamas) and Florida St. (at Williams as part of the ACC/Big Ten Challenge in women's basketball) have put this squad on a three-game losing streak. I have a bad feeling that this team will be exposed as below average. How bad they truly are depends on what could be a revealing screening week against non-BcS schools: Home to Detroit Saturday; a true road game vs. New Mexico Tuesday, then hosting Army at the Barn Thursday.
#-Infinity: Gopher football (Last Week: -1). I was at our watch bar because our game kicked off at the same time as the Gophers' finale, at Wisconsin. And they actually had the Badgers reeling; the U. led at halftime, 17-7. But in the second half Wisconsin blanked the Goofs while reeling off 24 points to keep Paul Bunyan's Ax, 31-17, ending the Gophers' season (I don't count the bowl game) 8-4 overall.
The inability to break through the upper echelon of the B1G was apparent since the season began. Much of it lays at the happy feet and inaccurate arm of Mitch Leidner; medicore the entire year, he was a woeful 9-of-26 for 158 yards Saturday, throwing one Touchdown (to Tight End Drew Wolitarsky, who quickly became Leidner's first and second option) but four Interceptions. So with Leidner moving on, this is an opportunity for Tracy Claeys (and it will be him; an 8-4 record and beating all the other shit teams in the B1G assures at least another year) to find a Quarterback who can fucking throw.
But is it possible that, you know, this is the best the Minnesota football program can do -- beating the Marylands and Rutgers of the world, maybe surprising a Penn St. or an Iowa once in a blue moon, and regularly getting trounced by Ohio St. and Michigan? Claeys certainly shouldn't be fired because Gopher boosters want the second coming of Nick Saban. I just wonder if being content with Claeys just introduces us to a stultifying level of above-averageness. But hey, at least the program is clean, right?
Bowl game next, therefore, barring an extraordinary circumstance, this is the last time I talk about the Golden Goof football club until Labor Weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment