What more can be said about another vomitous performance by the Golden Gopher football team? The Brewster Era kicked off with a showing that was positively Masonesque. Or Wackeresque. Or Guteyesque. In other words, completely representative of every slight that Gopher fans have endured over the past two decades.
I know what the spinmeisters (a.k.a. Sid, Mona, Maxie and the rest of the WCCO crew) are going to say -- they came out flat, fell behind 21-0, but after that they dominated the game and it's just a darn shame they dug themselves too big a hole to get out of. Heck, even the Strib story online tonight reflected that tone with a headline that read "Gophers' rally falls one point short."
Except that their rally didn't fall short. They took a 24-21 lead and couldn't hold it. Then, they took a 31-24 lead in OT and couldn't stop Bowling Green from scoring, or from completing their own rally with a 2-point conversion.
That's because when it came time to put the game away, the Gophers couldn't get it done. When the offense could have made it tougher on Bowling Green by scoring a touchdown on their last drive, they ended up with a field goal. Not that it would have mattered, probably, because every Gopher fan knows the Falcons would have scored a TD on their last drive had they needed it. They were going up against the Gophers' defense, after all, the defense that has patented the dropped interception, the fourth-down conversion, the close-but-not-quite-good-enough two-minute drill.
And we're left to read quotes like the following: "We needed to close it out. We needed to make one play on defense."
That was Brewster talking after the game, but it might as well have been Mason, or Wacker, or Gutekunst. But mostly Mason. I mean, if you didn't have fourth-quarter flashbacks to Texas Tech last year, Wisconsin the year before, Michigan in '03, Purdue in '01, Northwestern in '00 ... hell, pick a Big Ten team and I could probably find a year when the Gophers collapsed in the fourth quarter against them.
So, the Brewster Era has begun. Let's just hope we're not soon quoting another classic rock song: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
Don't get fooled again, indeed.
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3 comments:
I, too, watched the game on what Judd Zulgad would call the "fledgling Big Ten Network" with that brutal play-by-play duo -- who knew there was another Baldinger?!
My favorite part was when the PBP guy called it "a shock" when Bowling Green chose to defend first in OT, which a team should always do with college OT rules. Apparently BTN didn't hire an announcing team that knows that.
That was actually Jim Kelly, former Twin Cities resident and the voice of the America's Cup, among other big-time ESPN events. He must have covered some football along the way.
Baldinger was brutal, almost as bad as the other Baldinger. My personal favorite was when the Gophers scored their first TD and he started yammering about "the Gophers machine is rolling," etc. Bump had some nice shots at him on Sunday Sermons, too. Almost as embarrassing as Team Brewster's performance.
Hey, at least you didn't have to watch Notre Dame get bludgeoned on national television for, like, the 50th time in the last 10 years. (Why wait for the bowl game to embarrass your team and alumni?)
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