The State of the Football Program: Where it is and where it needs to go

Anyone who has done some serious goal setting knows that the important thing about the process is to set goals that are challenging but still achievable. Simply put: You don’t want to set the bar too low thereby squandering your potential and you don’t want to set it too high, thus setting yourself up for failure. Given that, here is where I think the Gopher football program is and where it should go in the near to medium term.

The Coaching Staff
Glen Mason has proven to be a very competent coach. He took over a Minnesota program in 1997 that hadn’t been to a bowl game since 1986. The Gophers are now headed to their fifth bowl game in six years. Is Mason a great coach? At this point I would have to say no. Great coaches win conference titles and take their teams to major bowl games, i.e. in January. Mason has done neither at Minnesota or anywhere else.

So should Mason be fired right now or shown the door in two years when his contract is done? Well, let’s get back to the goal setting thing. We need to set the criteria reasonably high. I think Mason is about as good a coach as this program can get right now. Two years is a long time in the college coaching ranks. A lot can happen in the next couple years, so I’m going to dodge that question for now. I will say Mason should be offered an extension loaded with incentives for wins and attendance, nothing more and nothing less other than to offer his assistants more competitive pay.

Speaking of that, Glen will need to make some tough decisions soon about his assistants. Given the collapse the team had in the second half of the season, some could be let go or given ultimatums. Which ones? Mason is a very capable coach whom I trust will make the right decisions. (Hint: think defense.)

Investing in the Program
It seems that every Big Ten football program is doing stadium renovations, a few have run upwards to $100 million. The Gophers need to catch up in this area and they need to do it soon. A reasonable plan for a new stadium was presented last year in the University’s Stadium Feasibility Study. Even this new stadium wouldn’t be on par with most of the Big Ten, but it’s a doable plan that will still be a big challenge to pull off. A new stadium won’t solve all the program’s problems, but it does get the program on a much faster track to success.

Even though this stadium thing is a huge expense, the program is in good shape in the overall aspects of its facilities. They have a very nice indoor practice facility. All the practice fields have the newly installed AstroPlay turf. The football offices, locker rooms, weight room (now the largest of any Big Ten program) and meeting rooms have all been recently remodeled at the Gibson-Nagurski Football Complex. And the Hall of Fame area has been added. Several million has been spent on all of this since Mason has been here. Little more needs to be done in the near future with these facilities.

Recruiting
I think Mason has done a good job in this area, mainly in player evaluation. He has found some overlooked players and brought in dozens that he was able to develop. Player turnover is low, especially when you consider the chances they are forced to take on some recruits. They need to keep the connections going with recruiting-rich places like Ohio, Florida, and New Jersey. The in-state recruiting has dropped off in recent years with national powers like Notre Dame swooping in to the few blue chips produced here. Minnesota needs to consistently get the top five in-state recruits and take eight of the top ten in the state. You then need to fill out the rest of the class with a dozen or so top-tier players, mostly from the other states mentioned.

The Gophers need a least an occasional class that ranks in the top four in the Big Ten and consistent top 20 classes if they are to ever expect a breakthrough season that lands them into a major bowl. Yes, it could happen with the recruiting classes they are getting now, but everything thing has to break their way to have such a season. In a grueling Big Ten campaign that’s a lot to expect, as we have seen.

How do we get the recruiting improvement done? Glen has said many times that the stadium situation is the most difficult issue to overcome when talking to potential recruits. If a stadium plan gets funded in 2005 there is still a chance that the stadium will be built by the 2008 season. That means every recruit in the 2005 class will get a chance to play in the new stadium for at least one year. No. 1 recruiting issue solved.

Attendance:
This is an area that has improved fairly steadily under Glen Mason. The average attendance for Big Ten games this year was about 51,500 and the overall home attendance averaged almost 48,000. That’s a 10% overall increase over last year and 15% over the year before. It’s also a huge improvement over the low point under Jim Wacker when an average of only 36,369 fans were at the games in 1991. Still, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

The Metrodome is a hard place to sell for college football, but the atmosphere is more than adequate when the place is full. The marketing effort to sell tickets has improved. This year’s effort to get more people in the seats included a Tickets for Troops campaign, where people could buy tickets that would be donated to military personnel, and a game in which all high school football players could attend free if they wore their jerseys. Both were successes and targeted the right people as potential fans.

However, their success was on a small scale in terms of boosting attendance. Something much bolder needs to be added to fill the Dome, especially for these non-conference games. For example, Illinois gave away 20,000 tickets to University employees and faculty for the Western Michigan game this year. It boosted the attendance for that game to over 51,000. If something bold like that had been done for even the Gopher game against Toledo it would have been a sellout.

Schedules
The non-conference schedules since Glen Mason has been the head coach are arguably the weakest in the program’s history, certainly in modern history. To the team’s credit, they have capitalized on it. The Gophers are riding a 15-game non-conference winning streak which is tops right now in the Big Ten. Mason’s non-conference record at Minnesota is 25-6 (.806), 23-4 (.852) if you only include the pre-conference games, and 21-2 (.909) in pre-conference games since his first year at Minnesota. The Gophers had a winning Big Ten record in only two of their five bowl seasons under Mason, making the non-conference record the boost they needed in three of those seasons.

The Gophers needed a weak non-conference schedule in the early years under Mason. Just look to Indiana for an example of a Big Ten program that can’t turn it around with a tough non-conference slate.

However, the time has come to upgrade, for the sake of attendance and challenge going into the conference schedule. We don’t need to go crazy here. No perennial powerhouses are needed, just one decent team from a major conference and no Division I-AA teams ““ having to count the Illinois State game for bowl eligibility this year may have taken care of the latter. Putting California on the schedule for 2006 is the right kind of move. One team, preferably not as good as the Golden Bears right now, from the PAC-10, Big XII, or SEC is enough ““ maybe two if there are four non-conference games that year. Missouri, Oregon State, Kentucky, and obviously Iowa State are the types of teams that fit the bill.

Summary
After the breakthrough season in 1999 when the Gophers went 8-3 going into their first bowl appearance in 13 years, the Gophers then hit a plateau. The program went 22-22 over the next three seasons. The same kind of pattern happened with Glen Mason at Kansas. After Mason’s first big season there (8-4 in 1992) he went 11-12 in the next two seasons. A 4-7 record followed his 10-2 campaign in 1995. A person could argue that Mason dalliances with other jobs while at Kansas and here was the reason for the inconstancy. After the 10-3 season last year, Coach Mason did not pursue other jobs, but the pattern of inconsistency seems to have continued. The next two seasons with be a critical test for Mason. Will the team go into another .500 funk or will Mason finally take a program to the next level?

To be honest, when Glen Mason first took the head job here I was convinced he would take the program further than it is right now. I felt then and still feel that the Minnesota football program has much more potential than Kansas football. The Gophers have no in-state rival like Kansas State to deal with ““ they have no in-state rival period. Minnesota has a much larger population than Kansas for a potential fan base and recruiting base. And the football team certainly doesn’t have to worry about living in the shadow of the men’s basketball program, as is the case at Kansas. The opportunity is here for Mason to become more than a Mr. Fixit and be coach in the class of others like Barry Alvarez who built a rock solid program literally from the ground up.

A bigger than ever commitment from Glen Mason to the program that will most likely be his legacy as a head coach, commitment from the administration, starting with President Bruinicks, that surpasses anything we have seen in the last 50 years, players and staff totally committed to this mission and a renewed hope among the fan base will get the football program to a consistent first-tier status in the Big Ten.