Fanfic: Ten Years of Brewball

I honestly didn’t think I’d stick around this long, but the decadence is just too much to give up on. Thumping bass from the 2500 speakers placed around the stadium. New 3’ expansions on the scoreboard every year to keep it the biggest in the country. Different offensive and defensive coordinators every year for the past seven seasons. Grass imported from the Rose Bowl every season. Yeah it’s effing year ten of Brewball.

Top 6 Reasons the Twins Made the Playoffs: You Won't Believe #4!

WE DID IT!

The Twins kinda sorta made the "playoffs" last night; earning the right to a one game wildcard playoff against the Yankees.  Sure, that always ends in disaster, but anything is possible in one game and these Twins are plucky.  Perhaps the pluckiest team on the planet.

The Twins managed the most incredible turnaround in solar system history last night after finishing last season with 103 losses.  How did they do it?  Let's take a look at the top 6 reasons:

Oh God NO! The Rose Bowl is a Playoff Game this Season

Look at that. I'm excited about the possibilities and it's not even October.

No, really, stop reading and look at that in its incandescent glory.

My goosebumps get turgid whenever I see that GIF. It's the promised land. A place I've always wanted to go, but won't unless it's to watch my own team play. To go, walk in and see emblazoned on the end zone: Minnesota.

So, here we sit in September and I'm trying to temper my excitement. Do we have a chance this season? Of course, there's always a chance. Look at Iowa in 2015 - they were a good, not great team, that ran the conference table and managed to get in despite losing the B1G championship game. Our schedule this season shakes out to be a bit more difficult than theirs that year, as, during conference play, they managed to avoid the two teams from Michigan.

Fan Fic: Year 2 of the Claeys Era

Remembering back to January, 2017, when we thought we had a chance at landing PJ Fleck as our coach, becomes more and more difficult as we enter conference play in Tracy Claeys' second full season as Gophers head coach. The team is undefeated, but the pall of the sexual assault scandal and threatened bowl boycott still hangs over the team. Attendance is down, as a sizable percentage of season ticket holders opted to sit this one out. Some due to the scandal, others due to the belief that the U had once again opted for the less expensive path of mediocrity.

Your author and his cohort chose to not renew because the games just weren't fun anymore. The last home game of the 2017 season, against Northwestern, had the stale, musty feeling of a tomb. That the university made no steps to understand what fans wanted the game day experience didn't help matters; but in all earnest, attending the games wasn't a good time. Our offense had failed to progress and, while the defense remained a strong point, it's hard to get jacked about defensive football when the stadium is 30% vacant and quiet.

7-0 You Say? What about...wait is this right? Purdue?

So the Gophers are sitting at 3-0 going into conference play and have a legitimate shot at starting 7-0. Maryland is crap, MSU is beatable, and with Tubby Smith at the helm, Illinois ain’t beating no one. The wildcard to going undefeated in the first seven? Purdue. Effing Purdue.

I’m not really sure what to make of them. At times they’ve looked brilliant on offense and pretty disciplined on defense – not recent hallmarks of Purdue football. At other times they looked downright ordinary. They played Michigan pretty tight for three quarters, but the Wolverines weren’t exactly playing high-quality ball; whether that was due to the Boilers disrupting their plans or Team Pleated Khakis having a bad day is hard to tell.

I’m more troubled by the fact that I’m worried about Purdue. It’s Purdue for eff’s sake. What if Purdue beats us and keeps us from the incandescent glory that is 7-0? Are we okay at 6-1 with the “1” being Purdue? The couple of games after that, @Iowa and @Michigan are kinda important, particularly the former. Will our fans have the wherewithal to travel to Kinnick, tear down and steal the goalposts and duct tape Brian Ferentz to them right after a loss to Purdue? Pray we never have to find out.

Why Being a Passionate Fan Effing Matters

It's 3rd down and short, Gophers are on defense, opponents are pinned at their own 15-yard line at the open end of the stadium. Gophers are up by seven late in the 3rd quarter, so getting a stop here would be huge. Me and my crew of three are up and in full throat, near the front of our section in the lower level. It's a huge play, I'm totally amped and I want to enjoy what the stadium looks like when all the fans are hyped to help the defense. I turn around to look at our section.

I see literally one other person standing, my road dog WCJ about 25 rows back.

Pathetic.

/whispers Who Wants an Elite 2019 QB?

Unless you’re a complete recruiting nerd (I used to be obsessed with it, but decided not to allow my happiness in life to be dictated by 17-18 year old jocks), you may be unaware there are a couple of big 2019 visits coming up over the next two home games: Both QBs and both absolute studs.

This weekend, in fact, Hank Bachmeier is coming all the way up from California to see the Maryland game. Hank is a four-star with a composite rating of .944 and is oh, the 4^th-rated pro-style QB in the nation. Maybe even the world. In addition to our club, he holds offers from UCLA, Ole Miss, Colorado, Utah and a few others. Word is he has some connections to the state of Minnesota, so let’s all pretend that’s super important to him and feel really good for a bit.

Sawvel Who?

Three posts in one day! Your boy's either got a methamphetamine problem, a lot of extra free time lately or, potentially, both.

I, like many of you, I'm sure, was gnashing the hell out of my teeth and tearing at my collars when Fleck announced Robb Smith as the new defensive coordinator, letting God King of Defense Jay Sawvel loose. Sawvel and Snorlax gave us the best Gopher defenses we'd seen in the better part of a generation and the prevailing belief was that Fleck fucked up massively. He'd bring in his crazy-ass run-pass option offense and we'd score some points; but we'd be back to Year One of Brewball, where we'd score 40 and give up 60 and drink ourselves into a coma every Saturday night. It was a foregone conclusion. All hope was lost.

The Most Delicious of them All

Everyone does power polls these days. Some, like Jaundice Tooth Dienhard over at BTN use nothing more than history and a cursory look at a box score to set them while others, such as ESPN use FPI (Fapping Projectile Incident) to ‘mathematically’ determine the quality of the respective teams. It’s a crowded field and we at Still Got Hope don’t have much interest in swimming with the sharks. We look for fresh, clean ocean to don the water wings and float until dehydration from salt water consumption takes our minds and our lives.

Today, we introduce a poll that, barring new entrants into the B1G, will probably never change. We know you’ve wondered about this for a long time and now it is time for the reveal and discussion. Yes, friends, which mascot, given our druthers, would we prefer to consume for dinner tonight. The tastiest mascot in the conference. 

So You're Telling Me There's a Chance!

You ever wonder what the probability of us going undefeated in conference play, winning the B1GCG, going to the CFB Playoff and winning the championship is? Well, I hadn’t either until I was desperate for content to keep up this unprecedented streak of posting, so here we are. I assign a percent chance of victory to each game and then using MATHS, calculate (probably incorrectly – it’s been, like 40 years since my last math class) the chance the Gophers sweep the table and let us all die happy and fulfilled.

1.     Maryland: Will probably be facing their 3^rd-string QB and we NEVER have problems against backup QBs. They looked like a solid team week one, but have since descended into a state of warm, fluid poo. WIN PROBABILITY: 80%

#TITTY

Sorry, guys, I haven't pivoted to an all-porn theme, despite the somewhat racy title of the post. I'm not completely ruling out the idea in the future, though, so if there's interest, I'll start putting advertisements on Craigslist and we can make some smut money.

Nay, the title of this post refers to some t-shirts I made two years ago that a few of the Gopher faithful bought and still wear from time to time. The shirts were maroon, with a large, gold picture of the state of Minnesota on them with the caption underneath "This is totally the year." This, of course, shifts well into acronym mode, where it spells TITTY, which, classy gentleman that I am, featured as a hashtag on the back of the shirt.

CTE and the Gophers Rose Bowl Runway

Quick little Saturday nugget to chew on while you're watching the only weekend of the college football season the Gophers can't ruin: any concerns about the rash of CTE (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy - a degradation of brain function due to repeated head trauma/concussions) issues and what the means to the future of football?

There's obviously been a lot of coverage over the last five years about a spate of former players who have killed themselves due to CTE - often by shooting themselves in the chest to preserve their brains for physical study. The latest case was Aaron Hernandez who killed himself at 27, but showed CTE symptoms more likely to be found in a 60-year old. This raises the specter the disease may advance more quickly, and at earlier ages, than initially thought.

The degree to which the CTE issue will affect the game is still uncertain. Both college and the NFL have instituted rules to penalize targeting of and leading with the head. While that's noble, it's not likely to lead to a dramatic reduction in head trauma: you might have two or three plays a game where someone gets drilled in the brain case, and the rules should help mitigate that damage; but it's the repeated shots, play after play, by offensive and defensive linemen, running backs and linebackers that take a toll over the long term.

And there's the rub. You can't penalize linemen for using their heads - getting your helmet into a defensive player is literally how you're supposed block certain plays. So to decrease the long term brain damage to these players, you're going to need to fundamentally change the way the game is played. Will football change to a 7-7 format? Or return to the days of leather helmets instead of outfitting ultra-athletes with body armor? Given the increasing coverage - and the scale of the issue itself - it's hard not to see the NFL and other organizing bodies, including the NCAA, make significant changes to the game in the next five to ten years. I mean, with as bad as things are now, it's not out of the realm of the imagination tackle football won't exist by 2030.

Which brings us to our beloved rodents. If we see the game materially changing over the next decade, will that help or hurt the Gophers competitive chances? I always say I'll see the Gophers in the Rose Bowl before I die, but that's predicated on me living to 90 and football still existing in 15 years. So help me God, if they kill the game the season when all of the starts are aligned for our run, I'll tear my house down and eat it piece by piece. That truly would be the most Gopher thing ever.