Nice, nice. I figured you were also on PP.O, that login name would be too much of a coincidence if not. Didn't take you as a Gopher fan from what I gathered from your posts over there, kinda pleasantly surprised.
Well, I'm a student, I've got season tickets at the Barn. I love college hoops and always have. The NCAA Division I basketball tournament is, in my opinion, the greatest tournament in the world. I have on more than one occasion spent the better part of an entire day preparing a bracket.
I've only ever attended two football games, though - one at the Dome in my freshman year and one at the Bank. My first problem is that I believe there's a lot wrong with college football - so much that I can't just ignore the problems as I watch. My second problem is that the Gopher football team is damn near impossible to get excited about - it's hard to hold out a lot of hope for the future when your hopes for next year are always modest at best. This is why I believe it's harder to be a Lions fan (or more accurately,
remain a Lions fan) than a Vikings fan - maybe the losses for a Vikings fan are more painful, but there's always the "maybe next year" mentality that can cheer you up. Without that "maybe next year" it's difficult to get excited, especially when you're too young to remember the good times like I am.
Also contributing to the "passion gap" is that I wasn't really raised as a fan like I was of the Twins (whose games I attended at least a dozen times a year as a kid) or the Vikings (my dad must have told me the story of how Pearson was totally pushing off at least 50 times). My mom went to Northwestern and my dad went to St. John's, so there was no real Gopher connection. Football in my parents' household was something that was watched on Sunday only. Saturday afternoons were reserved for yard work. But the Gophers were seldom talked about anywhere in comparison to the other teams - and this is huge, because sports are as much about the communal experience with fellow fans as they are about the game itself. So I spent most of my life entirely disconnected from the football team. This is one of the biggest obstacles that any incoming coach will be going up against - indifference.
It's an issue of the culture of the team. The problem with the Gopher football program is that there's just no "there" there - just a decades of subpar achievement and public indifference. This is what I mean when I say that the Gopher football team is as exciting as stale toast. In a saturated sports market, it has little to offer - being a fan of our football program simply isn't as fun as being a fan of the state's other teams. The entire culture of the team desperately needs to change. Frankly, a ruthless guy like Bielema would only help this team.
The post I made on PP.O about the Gophs was made when I was in a particularly foul mood, so it was a somewhat exaggerated version of what I actually believe (and a good deal more pessimistic). But yeah, I'll admit that I'm not quite as passionate about Gopher football as I am about the basketball team, the Twins, or the Vikings (which I've always stuck with, even in the days of Dan Monson, Scott Stahoviak, and, well...right now, respectively). However, I would still say that I support the football team in an extremely casual, rooting-for-laundry, be-true-to-your-school, to-hell-with-Wisconsin sense.
Suffice to say, my feelings about this team are complicated.
