If Gophers dont make the NCAA, what game do we regret the most?

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dingo

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What game that the Gophers played in, and had a shot of winning do you think we end up kicking ourselves about not winning? Is it better to eliminate a bad loss? Get another Road win?

For me, I would take a Home win vs Michigan to start the Big Ten Season. The game was right there for the taking, it gets us a big victory early in the season which puts us on the right side of the standings, and sets us up for the rest of the schedule.

Whoulda, Coulda.
 

dingo said:
What game that the Gophers played in, and had a shot of winning do you think we end up kicking ourselves about not winning? Is it better to eliminate a bad loss? Get another Road win?

For me, I would take a Home win vs Michigan to start the Big Ten Season. The game was right there for the taking, it gets us a big victory early in the season which puts us on the right side of the standings, and sets us up for the rest of the schedule.

Whoulda, Coulda.
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Too many to name...the OT loss at Michigan State, the home losses to Illinois and Northwestern or even the Purdue multiple OT loss. Gophers had their chances and did not come through. We really should not be on the bubble but that is where we stand and there are a lot of games we could look back on. Another sleeper candidate would be the Wisconsin game at home where we lost Dre to ankle injury as he has been a shell of his former self since that game
 

Home game vs Illinois. Wow what a bad performance. Northwestern rght in there
 




Sid Hartman said:
Too many to name...the OT loss at Michigan State, the home losses to Illinois and Northwestern or even the Purdue multiple OT loss. Gophers had their chances and did not come through. We really should not be on the bubble but that is where we stand and there are a lot of games we could look back on. Another sleeper candidate would be the Wisconsin game at home where we lost Dre to ankle injury as he has been a shell of his former self since that game
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All of these come to mind, northwestern home loss was the worst.
 

Sparty on the road is the obvious choice, but if all future results considered equal I'd say Illinois at home because that would have been 9-9 in the Big Ten with another top-100 win added. Gophers wouldn't have required Sparty's top-50 scalp if they simply had beaten Illinois.
 

NW at home is the easy one. The team is to blame for a few terrible efforts. The one that really ticks me off is at Purdue. Laughable officiating took that one away.
 

NW at home and Purdue on the road. Mo had a chance to win each of them with a made layup/hook shot.
 



at Purdue and Illinois at home.

more so Illinois. really no excuse for the performance against Illinois.
 



I've written this in another post, but I'll repeat myself. I've had basketball season tickets since 1990 and followed the team closely since 1982, and I've never cried after a game - even the national semifinal. But honest to goodness, the closest I ever came was this year's home loss to Northwestern. I think I realized right at the time how damaging the loss was and how it could very well be the difference between getting in and not.
 



none of these are as bad as some of them last year like at Northwestern and Nebraska. We never started the season off in the top 25 and were not a projected tourney time for half of the season so i can live with all of them. last year we were eighth in the country and we lost to NW and we just beat #1 IU and lost at Nebraska.
 


Best - MSU on the road.
Worst - Northwestern at home
 


Even though it was a win , the game that turned the season around was at home against the Badgers. Andre landing on Gasser's foot took him out for a number of the bad losses and he still isn't back to his old self. If that injury doesn't happen , the Gophers have more than enough wins to not be on the bubble.
 


This is a season where one more win- any win - puts us in. So for me it's all the games they lost that they were in until the end- which is quite a few.
 

Reuben Kincaid said:
How about playing a tougher non-conference schedule. Maybe that would have helped.
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I think our non-conference schedule was the 2nd or 3rd toughest in the Big Ten, not to mention Pitino only got hired in April and probably didn't have as much time to put together a non-conference schedule as he will in future years.

Josh Gasser taking out Andre Hollins is what did us in. We lost our next three games by a combined 8 points. Could we have still won those games without him? Probably, but it would have been easier with our leading scorer at full strength, and we could have a .500 or better conference record and be comfortably in the tournament by just winning two of those (and a top-50 road win at Nebraska would look nice on the resume, assuming they'd still be top-50). Plus after reading Buckyville the last couple days and seeing them mock and trash us (they seem to care a lot about what we think over here), my Wisconsin hate is at a very high level right now.
 

Cayman said:
I think our non-conference schedule was the 2nd or 3rd toughest in the Big Ten, not to mention Pitino only got hired in April and probably didn't have as much time to put together a non-conference schedule as he will in future years.

Josh Gasser taking out Andre Hollins is what did us in. We lost our next three games by a combined 8 points. Could we have still won those games without him? Probably, but it would have been easier with our leading scorer at full strength, and we could have a .500 or better conference record and be comfortably in the tournament by just winning two of those (and a top-50 road win at Nebraska would look nice on the resume, assuming they'd still be top-50). Plus after reading Buckyville the last couple days and seeing them mock and trash us (they seem to care a lot about what we think over here), my Wisconsin hate is at a very high level right now.
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I still don't like blaming injuries. My general rule is to always start with the stuff your team can control. We had plenty of close losses where a few less stupid or lazy or careless plays could have had us comfortably in the tournament field.
 

Breakin' The Plane said:
NW at home is the easy one. The team is to blame for a few terrible efforts. The one that really ticks me off is at Purdue. Laughable officiating took that one away.
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I have some defensive rebounding numbers to show you.

The one that hurts the most is Northwestern and Illinois at home. We can't expect to be a tournament team and throw those games in our house.
 

NW at home. No doubt. Even without Dre, if we play that game 10 times, we win at least 8. Win that and we're at 21 wins and RPI of about 40. I wouldn't be too nervous. Sure, winning at Sparty would have been great, but if we play that 10 times we win maybe once.
 

Win one more game n we are likely in. All of our losses turned into wins helps the resume quite a bit
 

I watched a lot of teams get some lucky bounces and fortunate calls over the course of the past two weeks while watching the bubble. If Dre Mathieu gets a call at home against Northwestern or on the road at MSU or if Malik Smith's 3 at Purdue rolls in instead of out, the Gophers have their one more win.

As a fan, the toughest losses to take were Illinois and Northwestern at home and Purdue on the road. The Illinois game was so strange because the Gophers were rolling early and then just got completely tooled the rest of the game. The Northwestern game the team lacked energy and someone from Northwestern still had to hit a really tough jumper late AND the Gophers had to miss twice at the rim to lose it. The Purdue game sucked because the Gophers effort on the glass was so atrocious. Grab a rebound or two in that game and they win. Any one of these three games could have been won with either better focus or effort as opposed to better play.

I don't know if I could have taken this Selection Sunday though if the one win was not Michigan State, because I think we would have been left out with every bracketologist in the world having us in.
 

Michigan in the conference opener. They were playing without McGary and Robinson was hurt for all but 3 minutes of the second half, but they couldn't pull it off. Hindsight says a win against the eventual conference champion would have improved our RPI, given us another Top 50 win, and moved us to 9-9 in conference. That would have been damn near impossible for the committee to ignore.
 

When does the Big Ten Schedule for Next season come out? I want to know who we're playing.
 


Reuben Kincaid said:
How about playing a tougher non-conference schedule. Maybe that would have helped.
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we had a top 10 SOS and top 30 non con SOS. Next year we play Louisville and probably 2/3 between Gonzaga, Georgia and St.Johns who will all have NCAA talent. Plus I am sure we will draw decent road oppenent for the Challenge. Hopefully we get a power 6 team at home as well
 

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