KARE 11 on 11/16/2011 Wed Night Why the U of M can't win in FB

Donate To GopherHole
Kare 11 Report

I missed the Kare 11 report on the Gophers but did find this online: http://m.kare11.com/topnews/article?a=946758&f=1251. Good god tOSU reinvests a ton of $ in its football program. How can they afford a rowing team?

The sort of good news is that if the U reinvested only 2-3 million more in FB, they'd be close to the top 3 in the B1G (alcohol sales anyone?).
 

Interesting things to me:

--Those of you worried that Maturi is sticking around can take heart. He wasn't interviewed and President Kaler did make an appearance. IMO, pretty clear signal.
--The lead item was the scholarship issue. Wasn't anything new, but that's obviously what Coach Kill emphasized. How he "cleans house" while minimizing the possible APR scholarship loss is going to be interesting to watch.
--No mention at all of cutting some sports to put more money into football but sort of danced around with our ranking of spending.
--No analysis of going to the Dome and the damage it did.
--The emphasis on staying the course both from Kill and from Kaler which was the most encouraging thing.

Superficial but fair. Hey, it's ratings month so superficial and unfair is the norm.
 

The APR thing seems really overstated when you look at how close the Gophers score is to Illinois who is in 7th place at 949 compared to the Gophers 935. The Gophers are just 4 points behind number 9 Purdue. Speed in Minnesota is also overstated because it's simply not there in much of the Big Ten and certainly doesn't explain falling behind Iowa, Wisconsin, etc. Not that bad of a story, but I still don't get why people are convinced it's "so hard" to win at Minnesota. We've hired one coach with a very good pedigree in my lifetime in Lou Holtz and he already had things looking good within in two years. It's going to be hard to win anyplace where the investment isn't there.
 

EG#9 said:
The APR thing seems really overstated when you look at how close the Gophers score is to Illinois who is in 7th place at 949 compared to the Gophers 935. The Gophers are just 4 points behind number 9 Purdue. Speed in Minnesota is also overstated because it's simply not there in much of the Big Ten and certainly doesn't explain falling behind Iowa, Wisconsin, etc. Not that bad of a story, but I still don't get why people are convinced it's "so hard" to win at Minnesota. We've hired one coach with a very good pedigree in my lifetime in Lou Holtz and he already had things looking good within in two years. It's going to be hard to win anyplace where the investment isn't there.
Click to expand...

The APR thing was a way to say we won't have an Alverez type turnaround. Alverez was able to run off double-digits amount of players without any scholarship penalties.
 

EG#9 said:
The APR thing seems really overstated when you look at how close the Gophers score is to Illinois who is in 7th place at 949 compared to the Gophers 935. The Gophers are just 4 points behind number 9 Purdue. Speed in Minnesota is also overstated because it's simply not there in much of the Big Ten and certainly doesn't explain falling behind Iowa, Wisconsin, etc. Not that bad of a story, but I still don't get why people are convinced it's "so hard" to win at Minnesota. We've hired one coach with a very good pedigree in my lifetime in Lou Holtz and he already had things looking good within in two years. It's going to be hard to win anyplace where the investment isn't there.
Click to expand...

Agree on the "speed" thing. I doubt anyone would say we have to recruit from MN for the majority of the speed positions on our team. A more fair comparison in terms of DI football players coming from MN would have been Iowa, Wisconsin, even Illinois. Then show DI players per DI school in the state (Illinois has quite a few more than us...). Just a thought.

The special did a good job showing, by the numbers, the potential roadblocks and challenges the U faces. It did skew the numbers slightly (only comparing us to the top B10 teams in terms of revenue/re-investment while not comparing to the other ones makes us look worse than we really are). It also did a good job of fairly showing Kaler and Kill's high level plans. What it SHOULD have done is spent another 2-3 minutes talking about the positives - what the U has, Kill's success in the past, recent recruiting wins vs. highlighting the losses, showing that the "weather difference" between reasonably successful schools like WI, MSU, IA, as well as VERY successful programs like Mich just isn't there, and finally playing up that we are one of 2 schools in the B10 with a major metro city 3 miles down the road yet still have a "campus campus" and not a bunch of buildings integrated in to a city block (kind of the best of both worlds).

If it were me running the special I would have also called out the legislators for forcing the U in to a situation where they haven't received money from alcohol sales. :)
 


Mulligan said:
Interesting things to me:

--Those of you worried that Maturi is sticking around can take heart. He wasn't interviewed and President Kaler did make an appearance. IMO, pretty clear signal.
--The lead item was the scholarship issue. Wasn't anything new, but that's obviously what Coach Kill emphasized. How he "cleans house" while minimizing the possible APR scholarship loss is going to be interesting to watch.
--No mention at all of cutting some sports to put more money into football but sort of danced around with our ranking of spending.
--No analysis of going to the Dome and the damage it did.
--The emphasis on staying the course both from Kill and from Kaler which was the most encouraging thing.

Superficial but fair. Hey, it's ratings month so superficial and unfair is the norm.
Click to expand...

I missed it, but I'll catch it on one of the links above, but if they didn't mention this, they missed a pretty big item (at least to me). 25+ years of indoor/off-campus football killed a ton of energy.
 

50PoundHead said:
I missed it, but I'll catch it on one of the links above, but if they didn't mention this, they missed a pretty big item (at least to me). 25+ years of indoor/off-campus football killed a ton of energy.
Click to expand...

I don't think there was any energy prior to going to the Dome.
 

MaxyJR1 said:
I don't think there was any energy prior to going to the Dome.
Click to expand...
Fair enough, but going to the Dome did kill off the game day tradition and experience which is a form of energy of its own. And one that will take time to recapture.
 

RailBaronYarr said:
Agree on the "speed" thing. I doubt anyone would say we have to recruit from MN for the majority of the speed positions on our team. A more fair comparison in terms of DI football players coming from MN would have been Iowa, Wisconsin, even Illinois. Then show DI players per DI school in the state (Illinois has quite a few more than us...). Just a thought.

The special did a good job showing, by the numbers, the potential roadblocks and challenges the U faces. It did skew the numbers slightly (only comparing us to the top B10 teams in terms of revenue/re-investment while not comparing to the other ones makes us look worse than we really are). It also did a good job of fairly showing Kaler and Kill's high level plans. What it SHOULD have done is spent another 2-3 minutes talking about the positives - what the U has, Kill's success in the past, recent recruiting wins vs. highlighting the losses, showing that the "weather difference" between reasonably successful schools like WI, MSU, IA, as well as VERY successful programs like Mich just isn't there, and finally playing up that we are one of 2 schools in the B10 with a major metro city 3 miles down the road yet still have a "campus campus" and not a bunch of buildings integrated in to a city block (kind of the best of both worlds).

If it were me running the special I would have also called out the legislators for forcing the U in to a situation where they haven't received money from alcohol sales. :)
Click to expand...

my god, this was a special highlighting the obstacles the athletic department has about turning the program around. I think a majority of people, excluding yourself obviously, are wondering why the gophers have had difficulty developing a winning program. This special did a good job addressing the majority of viewers.

Also, keep in mind that there is limited time to run a "special" during the news so spending another 2-3 minutes was not feasible. Kare 11 is not in the business of constructing documentaries.
 



I just watched the piece on line. I thought it was a decent piece but I do think it made it sound like the APR issue and money invested are the only things keeping us from going to the Rose Bowl. There are other issues as well but perhaps in the interest of time they decided to only focus on APR and $$$.

I agree with GoAUpher about the dome. We had a whole generation of Minnesotans and 20+ classes of U of M students that missed out on the on-campus football experience. That will take some time to rebuild. I think we are already are seeing the beginning of that. I'm encouraged by the fact that even when the team is getting blown out on the field, the student section, although not huge in numbers, seems to still be having fun. If it gets to the point where the University of Minnesota, not just TCF Bank Stadium, is the place to be on game days, other things might start to fall into place as well.
 

MaxyJR1 said:
I don't think there was any energy prior to going to the Dome.
Click to expand...

As a regular at Gopher games in the late 1970s at Memorial, the energy at Memorial was pretty good. Not a lot of sell-outs, but the student section at the open end of the bowl was always pretty much sold out. Of course, tickets cost about $10 (if that).
 

HopHead said:
I think we are already are seeing the beginning of that. I'm encouraged by the fact that even when the team is getting blown out on the field, the student section, although not huge in numbers, seems to still be having fun. If it gets to the point where the University of Minnesota, not just TCF Bank Stadium, is the place to be on game days, other things might start to fall into place as well.
Click to expand...
Agreed. Also good to see is that the #'s have stayed pretty consistent. There were more students for the NMSU (from photos, I wasn't there) and Miami games then there have been lately, but the size of the student section since then has seemingly been pretty static. So there is a core (albeit too small of one) to build off of. Grasping for positives? Yep. But things could indeed be worse in that regard. :)
 




The only part of the story I did not like was the interview segement with Mel Scanlon

the CDH head coach. Putting Seantrel Henderson and Michael Floyd up as examples of the best players as recent examples of leaving Minnesota and then interviewing there head coach at CDH. These two guys were never going to be Gophers first and foremost. They made that pretty clear, although for some reason Henderson did like to come to our Gopher home games.
Floyd did not even let the Gophers recruit him a bit, and Seantrel Henderson had his dad steering his recruiting to only where his dad wanted him to go like "Minnesota was not good enough for them or his son." It was the same thing with what Scanlon said in his interview "Players like Henderson and Floyd want to go to the big time programs where they feel will develop them to play on Sundays" and have the spotlight shined on them. I don't take offense or disagree to that point(high profile players leave beacuse of this), what he Scanlon said about players being attracted to high profile name programs that have the national spotlight does make sense, but seems to insinuate you cant be that guy at Minnesota.

I realize the recent record from the Brewster era, and the Wacker era's kind of taints the perception that Minnesota is always or was always bad. What I do take a little umbrage with is that players only want to go to schools that they feel will develop them to play on Sundays. That and big time players like Henderson and Floyd cannot do that develop at Minnesota as that premise would kind of indicate. Scanlons comments would kind of insinuate that. They the national guy's, even media and scouts will follow them anywhere when they play if they are doing well and are NFL prospects. Same with the NFL the scouts and coaches do not care where a kid goes to school if they see them play and like them, some care a little but not as much as you would think. Otherwise why would you see so many players from small schools in the league. Granted there are more players from the prestige programs but there are still a ton of guys that play at Abiline Christian, Sam Houston state, Lousiana LAFAYETTE, FAU, the Houstons and SMU, there are tons of guys that make the NFL in todays present game as there are big schools. If your NFL level talent scouts will find you doens't matter the school your at.
 

You must log in or register to reply here.



Top Bottom