Things are coming up Milhouse with this club, and this program. Tanner Morgan has be reborn now that he has been reunited with Offensive Coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca, who left after the 2019 season but came back in December. And the running Game is in high gear behind what may be The Best Offensive Line In The Country, and that's no joke. Fleck has recruited extremely well on that side of the trench, and it has, and will, pay dividends this Year. Add that to the probably down Year for Wisconsin and the possible down Year for Iowa, and believe it or not, the Gophers are, and should be, the odds-on favorite to win The Big Ten West Conference and advance to its first-ever conference championship in Indianapolis in December.
Now let's hope that they don't spit the bit at Huntington vs. Purdue this (Saturday) afternoon.
#0: Vikings (Last Week: -3). For a couple days this week, there was talk that the Sunday Night Football Game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, scheduled to play in Tampa, would be moved because of Hurricane Ian. After some talk, the National Football League confirmed on Wednesday that U. S. Bank Stadium would be the contingency site for that SNF showdown ... if local officials decided that Raymond James Stadium and the city of Tampa would not be ready in time. Unfortunately, the next day, city of Tampa officials said that they would be able to stage the Game, and so the NFL said that the Game would go on as scheduled. Ian apparently made landfall south of Tampa, closer to Fort Myers, and while that city and Lee County are devastated, Tampa and Hillsborough County are, I guess, able to function for a football Game Sunday night ... even though they're not too far away from Fort Myers and Lee County, and they still got a ton of rain and suffered a lot of damage. The show must go on.
Damn. I will admit that I was inordinately excited at the possibility of two NFL teams playing in Minneapolis -- and I know I wasn't the only one. A matchup of two good football teams, with two really, really good Quarterbacks? We don't see that shit around here! I have confessed many times on here that I love attending Matches as a neutral because I have no emotional investment in either team. Add the dimension of Tom Brady vs. Patrick Mahomes and I would have spent a pretty penny and waited a fair amount of time to get a ticket to see that showdown on three days' notice. (I have no idea how the contingency plan for attending would have worked if the contest was moved up here. The Packers were supposed to play the Saints to start off last season in New Orleans, but Hurricane Ida forced that tilt to be moved to the neutral site of Jacksonville. Did they keep out the public? Did they sell tickets for cheap? Did they force people who wanted to watch the Game to prove they donated, like, $200 to a New Orleans charity?) Anything different, please, than this Year's version of the Vikings, who had to rely on a late passing spurt (made possible by a missed Field Goal, a decision made by Lions Head Coach Dan Campbell even though his team was 4-of-5 on Fourth Down Sunday afternoon), capped off by a 28-Yard Touchdown Pass from not Tom Brady nor Patrick Mahomes to K. J. Osborn, to beat Detroit. If I were at home watching this Game, I would have fallen asleep in the middle of it. And when I woke to and saw the final score, I would've shrugged my shoulders and wished they would've lost instead. But they didn't, and compared to the other underachievers in the local sports scene, this Week rates as a 0 for The Purple.
Speaking of waking to, us Vikes addicts will have to get up early Sunday morning to watch them play said Saints. Those two squads are the first to play a Game that counts in London this season. ESPN's FPI has New Orleans as an overwhelming favorite, but there is late word last/Friday night that Saints Wide Receiver Michael Thomas is out for the Game and starting QB Jameis Winston is iffy. The backup QB, by the way, is Andy Dalton, and it would be befitting Vikes history for The Red Rifle to be instrumental in taking down Minnesota, Cooper Rush-style.
#-1: Gopher soccer (Last Week: -2). That 3-0 shellacking over Indiana looks like a complete fluke now that they wound up that three-Game homestand with back-to-back Losses to ninth-ranked Northwestern and Michigan. This side now sits at 5 (Wins)-1 (Draw)-6 (Losses) and, uh, are not that good. Maybe it was smart of me to skip watching a single Match of that team this season. At Wisconsin Sunday afternoon.
#-2: Gopher volleyball (Last Week: -4). Yeah, they swept then-sixth-ranked Wisconsin at Maturi Sunday. Don't give a fuck, 'cause they lost Wednesday, at home, to Northwestern. NORTHWESTERN!!! They barely have a fucking women's volleyball program!!! These people are 6-5 and I have no fucking idea what is goddamn wrong with this team!!! Northwestern!!!!
Finish up a three-Match homestand Sunday versus Iowa, then at Michigan Friday.
#-Infinity: Twins (Last Week: -6). While they've been faltering for some time before then, the Twinks were nevertheless tied with Cleveland for the lead in the American League Central after defeating the Chicago White Sox on Sunday, September 4. Since Labor Day, this fucking disgrace of a ballclub has gone 9-16 and sits, as of the end of September, three Games below .500 and in third place in the division. Doesn't matter if they went 4-2 this screening Week; with the Seattle Mariners winning Wednesday, the Twinks, who were riding atop the division for much of the season, were officially eliminated from postseason play.
Everything that could fucking collapse in the second half of the season on this sorry-ass team did. (Didn't help that Cleveland has gone a majors-best 21-4 since Labor Day either, to be fair.) Meanwhile, as I said in last Week's WMNSS, has gone from outrage to complete indifference. This organization is going to see, and probably not for the first time, that the fan base hating them is not as bad as not caring about them at all. And that's not going to change however much the organization is going to introduce a brand new Twins logo, uniforms and videoboard at Target Field. Change the approach to building a championship team instead, for God's sake. And why are they changing the logo and uniform? Is anybody complaining about them? Do they think that's the reason they screwed the pooch this Year?
I'm surprised, even though I wonder if I knew about this before the season started, that the season ends not on a weekend but a weeknight. All the better to end this season sooner. After finishing up in Detroit this weekend, they finish off this failure of a Year with three in Comiskey, Monday through Wednesday.
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