Atlanta Journal mocks Gophs: Minn bless their hearts, think they can do better

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BleedGopher

BleedGopher

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per the AJC:

Among those who say this are presumably anyone who takes a look at the history of the Minnesota program. The Gophers had a good run from 1993-94 to 98-99 with four NCAA tourney appearances and a Final Four run but those records were officially vacated because of an academic cheating scandal under coach Clem Haskins. Throw out those tainted years, and the Gophers have made the tourney eight times in their history.

But the new coach can do better than Smith by mining talent in a state that produces a great player every decade or so and convince those players to stay home. Or the coach can lure top out-of-state talent to Minneapolis by assuring them they will improve their games if only because there won't be many days they will want to leave the gym and venture outside.

http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/the-hater/2013/mar/25/minnesota-gophers-bless-their-hearts-think-they-ca/

Go Gophers!!
 

Having spent some time in Hotlanta...let us not debate weather. Just as many too hot to go outside in Atlanta as there are too cold in Mpls.
 

Such a cliche. "Too cold to go outside..." .wow is that ever funny
 

Hmm, couple thoughts. . .

* It's an incredibly sad state of affairs for newspapers when a byline or blog post is given over to an anonymous "journalist".
* For someone who presumably covers the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech basketball, you would think they'd have enough gold to mine in throwing darts at those programs. After all, in the "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" camp, Paul Hewitt, the dismissed coach of Tech, has advanced to a Final Four more recently than Tubby (which included several years at Kentucky).
* This "writer" certainly must have a sports radio talk show because he's full of misinformation (no idea about the upcoming bounty of MN prep talent), broad generalizations (up north it's real cold!), and no contextual understanding of the issues surrounding why Tubby was let go.
 

The writer is a fool. The Gophers were established as a competitive Big Ten team before 1993, and thus before the official dates of the scandal. In fact, two of their 3 NCAA "successes" came before 1993 under Clem. Further, the author displays no sense of the fact that the NCAA Tournament used to be much, much smaller. Referring to historical records that included inferrences that a program failed to make the tournament with regularity many decades ago is just silly. It's like claiming that a football coach who takes his team to a bowl game every year now by playing .500 ball is better than a coach 4 decades ago who won twice as many games but made far fewer bowl games - because far fewer bowl opportunities existed. That just doesn't make sense, and you only pull out that card when you're trying to sway the reader's opinion by manipulating statistics.

The author also fails to mention that a good portion of modern history was spent under some tough NCAA sanctions. Not that we are happy about that, but it remains a very good excuse for an extended period of relative failure in the 2000s.

Finally, you can talk about the weather all you want but the game is played indoors. And unless the AC is blasting on full, the weather in Atlanta sucks just as bad the other way for just as long of the year. Heat during a Minnesota winter is not much different than AC during an Atlanta summer. In both cases most of your time is spent indoors.
 


It's funny how little all these national experts and journalists actually know about the program other than what they can quickly look up on Google. Yes, our history isn't great. Yes, our resources aren't great. Yes, much like tons of states in the US, we have cold weather. All it takes to turn around a program is a great hire though. Can we do that? I don't know, though I suspect we have a decent shot considering Teague would really be putting his a$$ on the line if he didn't have a good hire lined up. Anyway, the point is that you try. Reusse wrote one of his few decent articles today. I'd rather take a risk and try another coach than stay a slightly below average team with few signs of an upward trajectory. Who knows, maybe we'll get lucky one of these times.
 

Wow. . . what a piece of garbage.

He is wrong on just about every point that he tried to make.

I had to stop and think why someone would write an opinion piece like this when they obviously knew nothing about the situation. I can't comment on the Premier League coaching changes because I know nothing about it. I forgot that Tubby coached in Georgia. This guy essentially wrote an opinion piece without looking into any of the information.

Well Georgia, have at him. He's available.
 

Bob_Loblaw said:
Wow. . . what a piece of garbage.

He is wrong on just about every point that he tried to make.]
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Yup. And apparently sports message board threads are now "reports".
 

Other than being wrong about local highschool talent the article is spot on... sorry but true tubby haters
 



cncmin said:
The writer is a fool. The Gophers were established as a competitive Big Ten team before 1993, and thus before the official dates of the scandal. In fact, two of their 3 NCAA "successes" came before 1993 under Clem. Further, the author displays no sense of the fact that the NCAA Tournament used to be much, much smaller. Referring to historical records that included inferrences that a program failed to make the tournament with regularity many decades ago is just silly. It's like claiming that a football coach who takes his team to a bowl game every year now by playing .500 ball is better than a coach 4 decades ago who won twice as many games but made far fewer bowl games - because far fewer bowl opportunities existed. That just doesn't make sense, and you only pull out that card when you're trying to sway the reader's opinion by manipulating statistics.

The author also fails to mention that a good portion of modern history was spent under some tough NCAA sanctions. Not that we are happy about that, but it remains a very good excuse for an extended period of relative failure in the 2000s.

Finally, you can talk about the weather all you want but the game is played indoors. And unless the AC is blasting on full, the weather in Atlanta sucks just as bad the other way for just as long of the year. Heat during a Minnesota winter is not much different than AC during an Atlanta summer. In both cases most of your time is spent indoors.
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Agreed. That logic always baffles me. Brewster is one of our programs most successful coaches because hey, how many past football coaches got us to bowl games in half of their seasons?
 

Lol, the author of the article is ' the hater '. :)
 


BleedGopher said:
per the AJC:

Among those who say this are presumably anyone who takes a look at the history of the Minnesota program. The Gophers had a good run from 1993-94 to 98-99 with four NCAA tourney appearances and a Final Four run but those records were officially vacated because of an academic cheating scandal under coach Clem Haskins. Throw out those tainted years, and the Gophers have made the tourney eight times in their history.

But the new coach can do better than Smith by mining talent in a state that produces a great player every decade or so and convince those players to stay home. Or the coach can lure top out-of-state talent to Minneapolis by assuring them they will improve their games if only because there won't be many days they will want to leave the gym and venture outside.

http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/the-hater/2013/mar/25/minnesota-gophers-bless-their-hearts-think-they-ca/

Go Gophers!!
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After reading about Villa 7 I am more confident articles like this don't have a clue about anything.
 



This article is pretty weak, but I will say this about the weather thing. I can understand people's attitudes about the cold, especially if you've never been here and that's the only thing you have to go on. If I didn't grow up here, I'd picture Churchill, Ontario and the polar bears. Even the reality is pretty harsh. I mean seriously, it's brutal at times. I always thought the desert southwest would be hell, but we drove to California two years ago in July, and it was hot, but it was a dry heat (yes, the cliche). Seriously, after seeing the national forests around Flagstaff, I can see myself in Flagstaff.

All that said, this is a place that, once people move here, they tend to stay here. It's a great place that's easy to become attached to. I think people in the South tend to be less sophisticated and not well traveled, and this column caters to that demographic. The author might not be that ignorant, but he's cynically playing to his audience.
 

Bad Gopher said:
This article is pretty weak, but I will say this about the weather thing. I can understand people's attitudes about the cold, especially if you've never been here and that's the only thing you have to go on. If I didn't grow up here, I'd picture Churchill, Ontario and the polar bears. Even the reality is pretty harsh. I mean seriously, it's brutal at times. I always thought the desert southwest would be hell, but we drove to California two years ago in July, and it was hot, but it was a dry heat (yes, the cliche). Seriously, after seeing the national forests around Flagstaff, I can see myself in Flagstaff.

All that said, this is a place that, once people move here, they tend to stay here. It's a great place that's easy to become attached to. I think people in the South tend to be less sophisticated and not well traveled, and this column caters to that demographic. The author might not be that ignorant, but he's cynically playing to his audience.
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I have heard the following from 3M, Best Buy and other Fortune 500 executive head head hunters. The hardest place to recruit executives for is the state of Minnesota the hardest place to recruit from the state of Minnesota. When they get here they don't leave.
 



Don't let these fools get to you. We were called every name you can think of when he left UK. You all did the right thing for your program. I know all about his coaching abilities. I could post a lot of things that went wrong while he was our coach, a lot of the same things that happened here. I could post a lot of stuff but don't like to go to other message boards and start crap. He will alwlays have people that wil say how great a coach he is. This I will never understand.
 


THE SCOUT! said:
Other than being wrong about local highschool talent the article is spot on... sorry but true tubby haters
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That's really the crux of the article. He is essentially saying that MN is a state that is so absent talent that a new coach won't be able to come here and have success.

So if you're saying that he was wrong the amount of instate talent, you're essentially disagreeing with the entire article.

No need to be sorry Saul.
 


There are lots of great places to play college sports; no one is going to pick Minnesota because of the weather but many might for all it has to offer. Instead of hammering the article and author you might talk about what Minnesota has to offer..
 

Minnesota has a small population so it will have fewer great or good players it is just math...
 

Jon said:
Minnesota has a small population so it will have fewer great or good players it is just math...
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What? Minnesota ranks 21st in state population. There are several states below us who produce far more high-level athletes than we do.
 


dpodoll68 said:
What? Minnesota ranks 21st in state population. There are several states below us who produce far more high-level athletes than we do.
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Sorry I am missing what your point is; if you have more people, you have more basketball players, you have more competition, and you end up with better basketball. Population is not the only reason an area might have more or better players. In the winter you have to make it to the gym to get a game in come summer you have to go to the corner… I would imagine states with winters that support outdoor basketball would have better players. Logically a state that is both warm and has a big pollution would have more and better basketball players...
 

Jon said:
Sorry I am missing what your point is; if you have more people, you have more basketball players, you have more competition, and you end up with better basketball. Population is not the only reason an area might have more or better players. In the winter you have to make it to the gym to get a game in come summer you have to go to the corner… I would imagine states with winters that support outdoor basketball would have better players. Logically a state that is both warm and has a big pollution would have more and better basketball players...
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You're contradicting yourself in your own post. More population does not equal more basketball players nor better basketball. Both of those things are quite easy to verify as false.
 

I ABSOLUTELY hate the "it's too cold" argument. NY City is cold. Chicago is cold - I live in Chicago and it was 35 degrees today. Minneapolis has so much to offer that it just frustrates the heck out of me when people always revert back to "it's cold." There are great companies, restaurants, theatres, museums, etc. in Minneapolis that many cities can't compare to; Atlanta being one of them. The fact that seasonally it isn't ideal 12 months of the year is something that some of the most recognized global cities have to put up with so the perception of Minneapolis being the only cold city is stupid.
 

dpodoll68 said:
You're contradicting yourself in your own post. More population does not equal more basketball players nor better basketball. Both of those things are quite easy to verify as false.
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Fine prove it if that floats your boat.

Look at it a different way; a small town has a graduating class of 50 and they have a basketball team; they might be the best in the state but math tells us on average they are going to be lucky to field a good team so they play schools that are similar size. A bigger school has maybe 1,000 kids in a class and while they might suck but math tells us on average they will be better than the school with 50 students and again they play schools of similar size.

In the end you play 5 players at a time and sometimes like 2014 Minnesota will produce the great class but most of the time the best classes are going to be in the high population centers... And players take staying home into consideration when picking school.

We beat some really good schools this year and maybe having Tubby as our coach on average over time is as good as it gets...

The bigger the sample size the more power math has...
 

gopher_alum_2005 said:
I ABSOLUTELY hate the "it's too cold" argument. NY City is cold. Chicago is cold - I live in Chicago and it was 35 degrees today. Minneapolis has so much to offer that it just frustrates the heck out of me when people always revert back to "it's cold." There are great companies, restaurants, theatres, museums, etc. in Minneapolis that many cities can't compare to; Atlanta being one of them. The fact that seasonally it isn't ideal 12 months of the year is something that some of the most recognized global cities have to put up with so the perception of Minneapolis being the only cold city is stupid.
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Yeah, it really boggles my mind how people are more afraid of putting on winter clothes than surviving devastating earthquakes and hurricanes...
 

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