Big Ten Football: Ranking the Rosters for 2020 (#9. Minnesota; Team to Watch: Minnesota)

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BleedGopher

BleedGopher

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Ranking the Big Ten's College Football Rosters in 2020
#9. Minnesota

Teams to watch
Keep a close eye on Minnesota. P.J. Fleck continues to see his stock rise, so any possible departure for another opportunity could throw a hurdle at the progress being made improving the roster. The situation at Michigan State is also worth watching as a coaching change leads to a new era. The Spartans have trended in the wrong direction over the last five years and cannot afford to lose much more ground to their division rivals.

athlonsports.com

Big Ten Football: Ranking the Rosters for 2020

Anyone who doubted what Ohio State could do going into the 2019 college football season with a new head coach must have forgotten just how much talent was on
athlonsports.com athlonsports.com

Go Gophers!!
 

Will this ever end?

PJ could also quit to pursue a career in welding or dance, or be hit by a falling anvil. So those are possible hurdles as well.
 

All this story does is reinforce the notion that once you get beyond the top handful of classes the separation in talent gets really thin and the rankings do not hold nearly the same level of value.

For example:
Penn State and Michigan both average a top 15 class every year (Michigan 10.6, Penn State 13.4). Yet their on the field success is basically dead even or slightly behind Wisconsin and Iowa who have averaged a ranking of 33.6 for Wisconsin and 40.2 for Iowa.

According to the rankings, Nebraska should be dominating the West with their top 20 recruiting class ranking over this stretch and yet their record is the inverse of Northwestern's over the same stretch and Northwestern's classes have average right around 50th.

According to the rankings, Maryland's class rank has been in the low 30s, Illinois's class rank has been in the low 60s. Based on that Maryland should be having way more success then Illinois right? Yet over that same stretch their conference records are identical and overall Maryland has managed to win one additional game.

In very general terms, the teams that average higher ranked recruiting classes are going to usually be among the better teams in the country, but as this story clearly shows, the class rankings don't tell the full story.
 

Vandy said:
Will this ever end?

PJ could also quit to pursue a career in welding or dance, or be hit by a falling anvil. So those are possible hurdles as well.
Click to expand...

You just have to ignore the stepping stone comments from uniformed writers. Until we have a sustained run of success we will be looked at as a middle tier Big Ten team meaning of course our coach is going to be looking for bigger and better things in their eyes.
 



Vandy said:
Will this ever end?

PJ could also quit to pursue a career in welding or dance, or be hit by a falling anvil. So those are possible hurdles as well.
Click to expand...
Welding? Dancing? Did you work in a repeat viewing of "Flashdance" over the weekend?

I'm not going to judge. I may have been flipping around recently and came across "The Sound of Music" right at the Lonely Goatherd marionette scene, and stuck around for the rest.
 

Urbandale said:
Welding? Dancing? Did you work in a repeat viewing of "Flashdance" over the weekend?

I'm not going to judge. I may have been flipping around recently and came across "The Sound of Music" right at the Lonely Goatherd marionette scene, and stuck around for the rest.
Click to expand...

Chuckle....nah, no Flashdance... Almost watched Roadhouse though... In my above post I wanted to cover the bell shaped curve of absurd possibilities completely. Just as Flashdance did...
 

MNVCGUY said:
You just have to ignore the stepping stone comments from uniformed writers. Until we have a sustained run of success we will be looked at as a middle tier Big Ten team meaning of course our coach is going to be looking for bigger and better things in their eyes.
Click to expand...

Athlon specializes in writing shallow, uninteresting content and this is just more of the same.

All this article really does is rehash past recruiting rankings in a ham-handed attempt to guess how good a roster "really" is. Since anyone with any sports experience/interest could do the same thing from home, it counts as little more than clickbait.

Articles like this remind me how awesome it is that games are actually played on the field, not on paper due to subjective recruiting rankings.

But they need content at this time of the year, so you get articles like this one.

Mindless, but fills space.
 




Vandy said:
Will this ever end?

PJ could also quit to pursue a career in welding or dance, or be hit by a falling anvil. So those are possible hurdles as well.
Click to expand...
I strive to avoid falling anvils. Stay alert is my motto. Not just what's in front of me, but what's above as well.
 

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