#-1: Gopher football (Re-Entry!). I don't know what is there to glean from the team's season-opening 48-10 victory Thursday over New Mexico St., a program that is already 0-2, got kicked out of the Sun Belt Conference, is trying to make a go of it as an independent and should by all rights drop down to second-flight college football. Of course, if somehow the Aggies marched into TCF Bank Stadium and beat the Gophers, I'd be losing my shit. But they won, convincingly, so I don't have to worry about that.
All I will say is that this is P.J. Fleck's second year. He may not have all of his players installed in his program, but he got his mulligan last year. Going 5-7 last year wasn't bad, and there were a couple losses that could have been victories with a break or two. But I've heard at least one person believe that this club won't win more than four games this year, and that would be a disaster. I need to see improvement. A bowl game, even a shitty one that occurs in mid-December, is a reasonable goal. And the schedule is lined up so that there are enough games against similarly-mediocre programs where Fleck and Row the Boat to, and I am not joking, eight or nine wins. And it is not unreasonable to expect the Gophers to defeat Fresno St., also at home, this Saturday evening.
#-2: Gopher volleyball (Last Week: -1). OK, what I thought these players need to do, sweep all three matches of their Diet Coke Classic, they did. Nevertheless, I am not impressed with North Dakota St., Georgia Southern and Arkansas as opponents, so compared to that, I didn't really have any program putting this squad behind a Gopher football team that might struggle all year. I am just surprised as hell that even after their struggles against two vastly superior teams in the previous week's Big Ten/ACC Challenge, they rose in the AVCA Top 25 from #4 to #3 -- although that was mostly because Nebraska lost to Florida (in an actually tough non-conference tournament, the VERT Challenge) and dropped from second to fifth.
I still have doubts as to how tough this team is. Maybe I will get answers this upcoming weekend in the Big Ten/Pac-12 Challenge (can a conference play in two Challenges against two different BcS conferences in the same season?). The Gophers and Penn St. represent the B1G in Stanford; the Gophs will play Oregon Friday and then the host Cardinal less than 24 hours later.
#-3: Twins (Last Week: -2). A 2-4 screening week, losing series to Cleveland and Texas, both on the road. This listless week was punctuated Sunday with an 18-4 drubbing at the hands of The Bastard Washington Senators v.2.0, where the foes racked up 16 runs between the Fifth and Eighth Innings and only one Rangers player, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, did not come around to score a Run in the contest, and that's only because he came in as a Pinch-Hitter in the bottom of the Eighth.
This squad has been largely irrelevant since, oh, the All-Star Break. But now that football season and autumn is winding up, it makes it that much easier to even forget that the Twinks are still playing. Maybe moreso since, after playing three in Houston beginning this (Monday) afternoon for a special Labor Day game, they will come home and play a trio with Kansas City. Will anyone show up?
#-4: Gopher soccer (Last Week: -3). It's weird; I always make a point to attend U. of M. non-con games because they feature teams that may not ever come up here ever again. For the novelty alone I want to see them; I'm sure I'll attend a game vs. Michigan St. or Illinois some time before I die. Customarily women's soccer teams play non-conference matches and tournaments for the first four weeks of the season. But it looks as though I will attend none of them this year.
How did that work? The Minnesota female XI began their year in Utah. They came home to the Robbie for a mini-tournament, of which I intended to actually go to all three matches being played on that weekend. But because of lightning, officials and the teams involved decided to split up the planned Doubleheader that Thursday; I had my heart set on seeing back-to-back matches, so I didn't want to go when it was determined the Iowa-Washington St. match was going to kick off early, around noon time. (Turns out that there were so many weather delays that it was decided that that match was cancelled.) I was going to see the match versus the Cougars Sunday right after watching the EPL downtown, but again, due to inclement weather, it was decided that the time would be moved up by two hours, and I decided I wanted to watch soccer on TV and cash in on a deal provided by The Local.
This week things went sideways on me. There was a game Thursday night, vs. DePaul, but I decided to help *****e*, one of the strippers I get to fuck, move. And on Sunday Stanford -- which is #1, of all things -- would be playing at high noon, but I already made plans to help out Mensa at the Minnesota State Fair around that time. There's one non-con game left, Friday against North Dakota St., but ... shoot, it's North Dakota St. It's not that exotic of a school, is it? They'll be around here to play again, I'm sure of it.
So at any rate I'm not playing on seeing any matches with this club for a while. And that's probably a good thing because these young women went winless this screening week. The Blue Devils beat the Goofers 1-0, and although Molly Fiedler tied up the match against The Farm in the 75th Minute to send the game into Overtime, Stanford's Sam Hiatt gave the foes the 2-1 Golden Goal victory in the 94th. The U. is now on a three-game losing streak, and more importantly, it has given up pretty much all of its CV in case it winds up a bubble team drawing comparisons with other bubble teams. At this point these Goofs need to play nearly flawlessly in-conference ... although they need to finish up their non-con against the Bison on Friday.
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