What made this a GREAT 7-win season ....

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Texan Gopher

Texan Gopher

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I know 7 wins is not "great".

I know some of the games we lost were our own fault (NC, Rutgers). (Michigan is on the refs)

With that said, here is why (in my 46 years of fandom) this was the best 7 win season in my lifetime .....

1) we finally beat USC

2) we won AT the Rose Bowl

3) the Brett Beilama curse was broken.

4) we ended the badger streaks and in an all or nothing game for them, we gave them nothing.

And PS, we lost, but the PSU game is the type of game I can walk away from and say we can play with the big boys. One play here or there and we beat them.


Damn good 7 win regular season.


Can anybody here with a great mind for Gopher history think of a better 7 win season we have had in the last 50 years?
 

They had their chances to win more than 7 which really made it great. Always fun to woulda, shoulda, coulda this team. Overall a really solid team top to bottom. Really liked how they have played since second half Michigan. Love how the new coordinators performed…can this be a regular thing? Can we continue this offense where they can actually pass the ball if needed? Really enjoyed that they could! Man I wish Max had another year!

Give me a team that’s competitive in every game and could win 6-9 games every year with the occasional great year that maybe, just maybe gets mentioned or makes the playoffs and I’m just super happy.
 


That is a fair account of the season. If the Gophers had the kind of one score game luck (well, they created their own luck but converting miraculous plays down the stretch vs Fresno and GA southern on fourth down was crazy) as they had in 2019, this could very well have been another 2019 for our rodents. It seems like at the “u”, Fleck is going to give the fan base a shot at a playoff caliber team every 4 years or so and I am okay with that.
 




Nice thread. Prior to michigan I was almost ready to jump off a bridge.
Since then, a nice 4 game streak, California Sweepin' by The Mamas and The Papas rose to number one on the Billboard Top 40, finished higher in conference than USC and maybe michigan, Washington (pending later games), wisconsin. I know they are down but it still looks good on paper.
Took a shit "On wisconsin" and both began and ruined their off-season at the same time unless one of their players actually passed a class. Like has been said earlier, the result of the season was a lot more rewarding than the outlook at the beginning. Overall not too shabby.
 

Texan Gopher said:
I know 7 wins is not "great".

I know some of the games we lost were our own fault (NC, Rutgers). (Michigan is on the refs)

With that said, here is why (in my 46 years of fandom) this was the best 7 win season in my lifetime .....

1) we finally beat USC

2) we won AT the Rose Bowl

3) the Brett Beilama curse was broken.

4) we ended the badger streaks and in an all or nothing game for them, we gave them nothing.

And PS, we lost, but the PSU game is the type of game I can walk away from and say we can play with the big boys. One play here or there and we beat them.


Damn good 7 win regular season.


Can anybody here with a great mind for Gopher history think of a better 7 win season we have had in the last 50 years?
Click to expand...


Probably the 1977 season could compare very well. The Gopher team beat UCLA, Washington(with Warren Moon at qb) Michigan and Wisconsin, among their 7 wins. Back then they played an 11 game season. They played a bowl game which they lost to Maryland. They finished 7-5.

That season on January 1, Michigan lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl game. That’s correct: the Gopher beat both participants in the RB game that season!

It was a pretty good team and a pretty exciting season with the AXE residing in the trophy case!



Sorry to Tech Machine: just noticed you ha mentioned the 1977 season early in this thread. Bad on me. But it really was a fun season!
 
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walrus said:
Probably the 1977 season could compare very well. The Gopher team beat UCLA, Washington(with Warren Moon at qb) Michigan and Wisconsin, among their 7 wins. Back then they played an 11 game season. They played a bowl game which they lost to Maryland. They finished 7-5.

That season on January 1, Michigan lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl game. That’s correct: the Gopher beat both participants in the RB game that season!

It was a pretty good team and a pretty exciting season with the AXE residing in the trophy case!



Sorry to Tech Machine: just noticed you ha mentioned the 1977 season early in this thread. Bad on me. But it really was a fun season!
Click to expand...
Not to mention beating Illinois 21-0, handing the ball to Kent Kitzmann an incredible 57 times.
 






oak_street1981 said:
That season is of great interest to me as it was my one, yearly trip to the old Memorial Stadium that involved the 16-0 win vs. #1 Michigan.

As I wrote more than once my dad was in the class of 1961 and took the student train to watch the loss to Washington at the Rose Bowl. He always expected things to revert back to the good old days and it never happened.

This was before the era of televised games for non top teams, so what I remembered was that my dad used to like blasting the WCCO Radio broadcast on the old fashioned console stereo in the living room. I was only 11 years old but I remember that 1977 Washington game (Warren Moon) reverberating through the house and out to the yard, then the Gophers won.

My mother was pretty tough, but the one accommodation he must have had, banished to the prairie hinterlands 100 miles from Minneapols, was to blast that WCCO broadcast through the house (windows open on a nice fall day) as he did some lawn work, fired up the grill, and had a beer or two.

He had tears in his eyes after the Washington win. and at some point around the Michigan win, he must have thought the good old days were to return shortly. At the time I considered it ancient history, but it was only 15 years past the January 1962 UCLA win at the Rose Bowl (poor Dad missed it by a year- he only witnessed the loss in January 1961 to Washington)).. Turns out he had Lucy pull out the football on the long suffering Gophers one more time.

Sure I went to the Rose Bowl this year to try to witness one more win for my departed dad, and we did win, so maybe that is enough.
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Thanks for sharing your dad’s Gopher footbsll
story—generation to generation. My dad is hale & hearty at 93. The first game he attended was the 1940 Minnesota-Washington games. In 1941 he saw the Minnesota-Pittsburgh game. He was part of an MPR story in the runup to the 2019 Penn State game. My maternal grandparents were at the 1941 Minnesota-Michigan game in Ann Arbor—which was the de facto national championship game. We have their pictures from the game. (Danny Spewak’s book about the 1941 team and the coming of War to the U.S. is outstanding.)
 




What made this year head and shoulders better than last was the fact that even most of the games we lost were more fun to watch. The second half of Michigan, the first half of Iowa, North Carolina because it was opening night probably only Rutgers was a game that was like almost all of the ones last year painful to watch.
 

What a strange year. We legit had fans calling for Fleck's head and ready to blow things up early in the season to now when most can agree it was a solid season which could have been better but in the end wasn't terrible.

Definitely shows why you need to let a season play out before over reacting and making rash decisions.

7 wins, easily could have been more....hopefully ends with a fun bowl game somewhere against a quality opponent. Definitely not a great season but all things considered I'll take it.
 

Texan Gopher said:
I know 7 wins is not "great".

I know some of the games we lost were our own fault (NC, Rutgers). (Michigan is on the refs)

With that said, here is why (in my 46 years of fandom) this was the best 7 win season in my lifetime .....

1) we finally beat USC

2) we won AT the Rose Bowl

3) the Brett Beilama curse was broken.

4) we ended the badger streaks and in an all or nothing game for them, we gave them nothing.

And PS, we lost, but the PSU game is the type of game I can walk away from and say we can play with the big boys. One play here or there and we beat them.


Damn good 7 win regular season.


Can anybody here with a great mind for Gopher history think of a better 7 win season we have had in the last 50 years?
Click to expand...
Your #4 is a big one for me. Certainly the Ax, but also denying them a post-season. I'm delighted at that.
 

The crunching of the Badgers casts a warm light over the season. What gnaws at me is a defense performance worthy of nine wins which was compromised by various factors. Looking forward to a bowl game & an eighth win.
 

SUPER disappointing in hindsight, but every loss was to a bowl eligible team, and the worst was to 6-6 UNC in a mistake-filled first game of the season. Memorable wins over USC, Illinois (may have kept them out of the playoffs in retrospect), and Wisconsin. Staff and players deserve a TON of credit for the 4 game win streak, effort against PSU, and domination against Wisconsin. Fun season in many ways, but it could’ve been a truly special one with a few less mistakes and just a couple more plays. Glad to be a Gophers fan this year though.
 

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