Two Scenarios

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upnorthkid

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This is just for speculation, but say we have

this season (potentially) and we beat msu next week, get a jan 1 bowl and win that as well and finish 10-3 but lose all our big rivalries

vs.

we beat wisc, iowa, mich, but lose some others we shouldn't, and finish 7-6 with a loss in a weaker bowl.

So basically I'm wondering, do you guys more so prefer winning the rivalry games or the overall season success? i mean obviously having a 10 win year where we rock all 3 of those teams would be the best, but it's just been kind of interesting to see this team win every game but our rivalries this year (kind of discarding psu because that hasn't really been a rivalry)
 

I'd take 10 wins and losses to rivalries over 7-6 and beating the rivalries.
 


I would take 7-6 and wins over WI & IA over 10-3 with losses to those two. I would be very happy with a 10-3 year in 2013, but would trade it for Floyd and the axe. #Hate
 

10 win seasons make you somebody if you can repeat them. Look at MSU this year.
 


Ending a 9-10 year skid to the Badgers and having a full trophy case for the first time since the 60s or 70s? To me that's sweeter than a Gator Bowl.
 

Spoofin said:
I would take 7-6 and wins over WI & IA over 10-3 with losses to those two. I would be very happy with a 10-3 year in 2013, but would trade it for Floyd and the axe. #Hate
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Me too. Especially after a decade of losing to Wisconsin.
 

Does a 10 win season help recruiting more than a full trophy case? I think so. Most high school kids don't really care about the Axe or Floyd until they become part of one of the rivalries. I feel that if we were to win 10 games, that would include winning a January 1st bowl game, our program would be more capable of repeating the effort due to the national exposure. Then we could fill the trophy case every year!! :cool:
 

I'll take the 10 win season because of the bowl situation and recruiting. We kick Iowa and Wisconsin 's ass in every other sport, so to me we are ahead of the game. Yes I want us to win the axe and the pig, but if you're are talking trophies I rank them like this.
1. Football National Championship
2. NCAA Basketball National Championship
3. NCAA Hockey Championship
4. The Little Brown Jug
5. The Victory Bell
Summary: Michigan and Penn State have won National Championships and are considered "helmet " schools. If we had a trophy series with Nebraska we would be holding it. On the National scene Wisconsin hasn't won jack sh-t.Not
sure if Iowa has ever won a football National Championship.
 



I'm torn. A 10 win season at Minnesota doesn't automatically mean we're "in" from the media perspective (next year do we start out ranked, are we talked about, do they predict 5+ BT wins, etc). If we're losing to WI and IA (and Michigan) but hit 10 wins, it's very likely that our wins came against softer opponents (4 NC, a bowl game vs a mediocre foe, and beating the lower Big Ten teams) with many questioning "how good we really are" if we can't beat any of MI, IA, WI. They write off the 1-2 big wins (MSU and NE, using this season as an example if we were to win vs MSU) saying they're more flukey than indicative of our program's strength. And we have to hear from our rivals' fans for another year we lost. 7-6 with 3 major victories and trophies is huge.

That said, people would criticize us for beating the bigs and losing to the weaker opponents.

Gun to my head, I'd take 10-3 I guess. 10 wins is no small feat for any school (yes, even you, Wisconsin).

Can't we have this instead: 8-9 wins most years with 1-2 wins from WI, IA, NE, MI. Some seasons it's 3-4 (when we break out with 10-11 wins), some it's 0-1 (those are the years we only win 6-7 games). I'd much rather have that.
 

I am going to grudgingly answer that I would prefer 10-3 with the losses to the rivals (though I would probably rather go 7-6 if we could win the rivalry games if we lost the bowl game, the out of conference, but went 7-1 in B1G play with a loss to a non-rival). It is frustrating that the games where our offense really didn't show up were the three games that I care the most about. Hopefully next year we can light it up and not have it be an either/or kind of thing.
 

FreakyDeke said:
Ending a 9-10 year skid to the Badgers and having a full trophy case for the first time since the 60s or 70s? To me that's sweeter than a Gator Bowl.
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No question for me, I woudl take the trophies over the bigger bowl. you still get to go to a bowl game at 7-5 (then have a chance to win the bowl game to become 8-5.
but realistically if you win all the trophy games you will not end up 7-5 or less. you win the big threee and you will be looking at a 1-2 lost season overall.
 

I think it is all about short term/long term though. A 10-win season would probably mean we are a better program, which would also mean we would have a better chance of beating Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan more often in the coming years.
 



GophersInIowa said:
I think it is all about short term/long term though. A 10-win season would probably mean we are a better program, which would also mean we would have a better chance of beating Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan more often in the coming years.
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Just for the sake of argument.. in the 10 seasons since our last 10-3 campaign, we've beaten Iowa 3x, Michigan once, and Wisconsin 0 times... :)

Obviously there's more to it than that, but a 10-3 year could be just a lucky string of weak opponents overall and 1-2 decent wins rather than a sign of future improvement.

But I agreed with you anyway.
 


ruppertflywheel said:
I'll take the 10 win season because of the bowl situation and recruiting. We kick Iowa and Wisconsin 's ass in every other sport, so to me we are ahead of the game. Yes I want us to win the axe and the pig, but if you're are talking trophies I rank them like this.
1. Football National Championship
2. NCAA Basketball National Championship
3. NCAA Hockey Championship
4. The Little Brown Jug
5. The Victory Bell
Summary: Michigan and Penn State have won National Championships and are considered "helmet " schools. If we had a trophy series with Nebraska we would be holding it. On the National scene Wisconsin hasn't won jack sh-t.Not
sure if Iowa has ever won a football National Championship.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure about the kicking Iowa and Wisconsin's ass in every other sport. Namely WI BB and Iowa Wrestling. Has U of M won a few here and there, yes but they haven't had sustained success in football, wrestling and basketball over either Iowa or Wisconsin.
 

I would take an 8 win season and just one trophy (namely, the axe). But 7-6 is just too costly in losses compared to 10-3--even with all trophies in hand.
 

7-6. No only do I want the trophies, but we would lock up some real recruits visiting the trophy games.

e.g. Had be beaten Wisconsin, Jeff Jones and Frank Ragnow may have likely committed, even if we had lost against Northwestern and Indiana.
 

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