Football games are only as exciting as the fans make them. That is a fact. The NFL wouldn’t be the juggernaut it is today if sports enthusiasts didn’t care so passionately about their respective teams.
There’s a reason home games often favor the local team. There’s something about playing a side in the heartland of their fan base that makes them that much harder to beat.
Of course, for all the strength that can be drawn from them, fan bases can have a debilitating impact on the efforts of a team, especially when their opinions on the future of that team take a negative turn. The college football odds for next Minnesota Gophers game are not terrible.
They could be better but they aren’t terrible. But you wouldn’t know that considering the hullabaloo being raised over the team’s loss on Saturday. Minnesota is often compared to Wisconsin and Iowa.
There are similar traces that can be found in all three teams. However, their fan bases couldn’t be further apart. Badgers fans wouldn’t be as harsh on their team as Gophers fans are being right now.
And no one is disputing the abysmal nature of the loss against Maryland on Saturday. But everyone is taking that one loss and extrapolating it across the rest of the season. There are Gophers fans who actually believe that Saturday set the baseline along which the Gophers will perform for the next couple of weeks.
That attitude is quite shameful. Sure, Saturday was horrible. And it wasn’t just because of the loss. Teams lose games all the time. The Gophers made things worse by playing really horribly.
There’s nothing in any of the three phases of the game that is worth praising. Minnesota should have won that game. That is what everyone expected. All the odds elevated the Gophers to the position of favorites.
And Maryland wasn’t even putting their best foot forward, to begin with. For a team to stink the way Minnesota stunk on Saturday, it is only natural for fans to be disappointed.
But there’s no excuse for letting that disappointment color one’s support for their team. The Saturday game is not an indicator of Minnesota’s performance for the rest of the season. It was one bad game.
In fact, the team can now proceed with the knowledge that they have quite a few changes to enact. There’s definitely a lack of depth that must be addressed and if the Gophers step up and resolve their weaknesses, there’s no reason they can’t bounce back in the near future.
Of course, if Minnesota continues to perform the way they did on Saturday, then fans have a good reason to despair. But it would help if Gophers fans had a little faith in their team.
They must be availed the opportunity to fix their mistakes. It would be foolish to give up on them now and presume that they cannot win another game on their schedule.
Keep in mind just how terrible they were against Maryland. And yet they managed to keep the score at 24-24 with two minutes remaining. That tells you that as bad as the team was, they must have been doing something right to keep from being totally obliterated.