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University of Minnesota Athletics
Blog: Tremendous Turnaround
12/4/2008 12:00:00 AM | Football
No other NCAA Division I (FBS) college football team has had a bigger turnaround season than the Minnesota Golden Gophers. Minnesota was 1-11 in 2007 and has improved its win total by six this season. The Gophers still have a bowl game on the horizon, where they could push that number to seven.
A six-game turnaround is pretty lofty company in the Big Ten. Only five Big Ten Conference teams have ever engineered a bigger one-season improvement. In Minnesota history that number has only been matched once. Legendary head coach Murray Warmath won Big Ten and National Championships in 1960, engineering a six-game improvement over the 1959 season.
A couple weeks ago, prior to the regular-season finale, Minnesota Director of Athletics Joel Maturi said a 7-5 record (which is where the Gophers stand right now) would easily be considered a success.
“Going into this season, most people would have been ecstatic with a 7-5 record going into a bowl game,” Maturi told the Pioneer Press.
Head coach Tim Brewster is equally as enthusiastic about what his team has accomplished in 2008. He has continued to be tremendously positive about the direction this team is headed. In fact, Brewster is currently out recruiting potential future Gophers, spreading the word about his team, the success of this season and the plans he has for Minnesota to reach even greater heights in the future.
En route to their breakout, turnaround season in 2008, Brewster and his team proved a great deal of the experts wrong. While the Big Ten doesn’t release a complete preseason poll, numerous media outlets are willing to give their preseason opinions. Those opinions weren’t very high when it came to the Gophers’ prospects for this season.
After looking at a total of 15 well-respected publications and websites and their preseason picks, those rankings were put into a composite. Minnesota was by far the 11th-ranked team among the experts in those polls. Ten of those 15 had Minnesota finishing dead last in the Big Ten. Only one of them (College Football News) picked the Gophers higher than 10th, predicting them to finish in a tie for 9th.
But Minnesota finished the regular season in a tie for sixth-place in the Big Ten and are headed for a bowl game just two years into the Tim Brewster era.
The turnaround can be traced all the way back to the hard work put in by the players and the staff since the day after the 2007 season ended, all the way up to the last day of 2008 fall camp. But one of the biggest springboards for the 2008 turnaround may have come in the season-opener.
Northern Illinois (which has enjoyed a four-game improvement of its own this season) held a 27-24 lead over the Gophers with less than one minute remaining in the contest. The Gophers were facing a fourth-and-1 from the Huskies’ 3-yard line. A chip shot field goal would likely send the game into overtime. But Coach Brewster showed faith in his team. The Gophers lined up and powered the ball for a first down to the 1-yard line. One play later, Minnesota was in the end zone with a game-winning touchdown and the Gophers began to erase many of the memories of 2007.
Coach Brewster and his staff have continued to have that kind of faith in this team throughout the 2008 season and it paid off in the form of what could be the biggest one-season turnaround in Minnesota history by the time bowl season comes to an end.
-AS
