This is a historically bad time to be bad in college basketball, for reasons we’ll get into. And, being honest, the Minnesota Gophers are bad. In this day and age, miracles are pretty much out of the question. The top half of the Big 10 is out of reach for the Gophers. The Gophers’ only real goal is to get a little bit better, and to create a little bit of momentum so that a better caliber of player might be looking to come here in the future. Can the following roster do that?
C–Pharrel Payne, 6-9, Soph, avg. 8 pts-5 reb. as a freshman/Back up is 6-11 transfer Jack Wilson from Oregon State, Idaho and Washington State; he scored 4 ppg at Idaho one year
PF–Dawson Garcia, 6-11, Jr., avg 15-7-2 assists last year/Back up is 6-8 redshirt freshman Kadyn Betts from Pueblo, CO, where he avg. 23 pts-12 reb-4 blk and was regarded as one of Colorado’s top players
SF–Joshua Ola-Joseph, 6-7, Soph, avg 8-3 last year/Back up including 6-10 Isaiah Ihnen, and 6-8 Lithuanian freshman Kris Keinys, and 6-8 Parker Fox who scored 22 ppg in 3 years at Northern State
PG–Cam Christie, 6-6 freshman from Illinois where he was rated the #2 player in the state/Back up is 5-11 junior transfer Elijah Hawkins from Howard where he scored 13 ppg
SG–Mike Mitchell, 6-2, Jr., transfer from Pepperdine where he scored 11 ppg on 43% shooting/Back up is Braeden Carrington, 6-4 soph, who scored 6 ppg on just 32% shooting as a frosh
The Gophers of course lost SF Jamison Battle who transferred to Ohio State. That is a significant loss though it’s true that he and Garcia did not seem to jell, and as a result Battle’s scoring fell from 17 to 12 ppg and he shot only 37%. PG Talon Cooper is gone. He scored 10 ppg but shot just 38% and was a disaster on defense. Guard Jadyn Henley is also gone, but he shot just 38%. As a team, the Gophers shot just 43-32-62% last year while our opponents shot 45-36-71% and outscored the Gophers an average of 71-63.
Obviously the big question is whether Christie is up to the Big 10 as a freshman. Or rather the big question is the Gophers back court generally. Can Mitchell and Hawkins compete in the Big 10, coming from much weaker conferences and neither of them with any significant size. And can Carrington pick it up? He was tentative and a step slow as a freshman but is obviously a solid athlete. Four guards is not a lot of guards in the Big 10, so if any one of these 4 is not up to the task, the Gophers will be in trouble, though it’s also true that Ola-Joseph and Fox could also step back into the SG spot, but that might in turn leave the Gophers a little thin at forward.
The second big question is whether the Gophers can get any production from Ihnen and Fox, both of whom have spent not one but two years on the injured list.
And the third big question is whether the Gophers can shoot it any better. 43% and 32% from 3 is not going to cut it. Losing 3 guys who shot under 40% last year might qualify as addition by subtraction but only if somebody steps up and shoots it better.
So here’s how the Gophers can optimize, which might mean getting back to the 13-17 record of 2 years ago, or say 8-4 non-conference and 5-14 in the Big 10. 1) Christie is a star, the Gophers best guard since Bobby Jackson, which is not impossible from the #2 player in Illinois. 2) Pharrel Payne almost doubles his production from last year. 3) Garcia stays healthy. 4) Everybody stays healthy so that after Christie, Payne and Garcia, Ben Johnson can play the rest of his rotation by committee, putting out the best possible matchups each night. 5) As a group, they shoot 45 and 35% and 70% from the line. 6) And, their defense doesn’t get torched by quick guards like they did last year. There is no margin for error, of course. If any of these 6 things doesn’t happen, the wins dwindle back toward last year’s record.
And the biggest question of all, then, is whether a “stop the bleeding” season like we’ve described here can be parlayed into better talent down the road. If the Gophers can’t pull out of this tailspin now, then I don’t know when.
Crazy, Man
I think it’s safe to say that everybody knows that college athletics have arrived at a historically historic moment. A crazy, wacky time when suddenly all tradition is thrown to the wind in what previously was one of the most historically oriented sectors in major sports. Only major league baseball professes, or can profess, to a reverence for tradition that major college football and basketball generally have professed. But, that’s all over now. It’s a new era. The catch is that nobody knows where in the holy hell it’s headed; well, or maybe they do, and that’s an even more depressing thought. The Gophers are but a minor cog in a very big wheel, and it’s a wheel that’s not designd for the benefit of the Minnesota Gophers.
After World War II, television first came on the scene with what passed at the time as big wads of cash for the rights to televise major sports. In the world of college sports, the NCAA grabbed the bull by the horns. It declared itself to be the rightful negotiator of TV contracts and, by and large, the colleges and the conferences acquiesced. The NCAA adopted an egalitarian model and also asserted itself as the arbiter of morality in college sports. Sure, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Notre Dame and USC and the other power 5 teams got most of the exposure. But the NCAA spread the money around so that Rice and Temple and Wake Forest and Wyoming would also get some of the cash and would be able to maintain their athletic programs. On the other hand, it cynically crucified the small and medium fry in order to create the impression that it was enforcing the rules, that there was a moral basis for its structure. Forty years later, when Clem Haskins broke the rules to keep Bobby Jackson eligible, the system was well-enough established that everybody knew what would happen. Haskins and the Gophers indeed got crucified. The Gophers didn’t even protest. A few years later, North Carolina got caught doing the same thing, and everybody winked and smiled and looked the other way.
The enforcement part of the model worked pretty well, but then there was the revenue side. It took 50 years for the 800 pound gorillas to decide that since they were the ones generating most of the revenue that, well, they should get most of that revenue. If there’s an overriding theme in the recent movement of teams from one conference to another, it is quite obviously the idea that Notre Dame and Oklahoma and Texas and USC and maybe Florida State should be getting more of the money and somebody else should be getting less. So, over the past 25 years, the cream of the crop, the best of the best, have persistently chipped away at said egalitarianism and have now, finally, figured out how to funnel most of the money to, well, not just the old power 5, but the top half of the power 5. The national champion is no longer the NCAA champion, they’re the champion of some subset of the NCAA–the BCS or the CFP or whatever. In the old Big 10, that obviously meant Michigan and Ohio State, and in the new Big 10 it means them plus Penn State, USC, UCLA and, well, maybe Michigan State or Iowa, all of whom could care less if the Indianas and Purdues and Minnesotas of the world are carried along in the rising tide or not. I mean the entire world of college sports is sitting on its hands today as Oregon State and Washington State sink to Tier 2 status.
Now, make no mistake. The Big 10 Conference wants USC and UCLA in order to get a California television audience. It doesn’t want Stanford, for goodness sake, because it would have to pay the Cardinal more of a share than they will bring in in television viewers over and above what it’s already got with USC and UCLA. Well, seriously. Then, how important are the University of Minnesota Gophers to such an entity that doesn’t even want Stanford as a member. If Minnesota were not already a member, well, being honest, we’d be Iowa State. And, do you seriously think that an association that doesn’t even want Stanford has a whole lot of respect for Iowa State or Minnesota?
More to the point, of course, is that not only is Minnesota not a draw for television viewers, but even more to the point, teenage athletes are only too well aware of how Minnesota and Iowa State might relate to their future ability to man a slot in the NFL or the NBA. Well, Michigan and Ohio State have the prestige of all the winning teams that they’ve had in the past 50 years (and that the Gophers haven’t) and obviously kids believe that playing at Michigan or Ohio State will open doors to NBA or NFL careers, while playing at Minnesota just won’t be as advantageous.
So the big 3 trends in college sports are that 1) they’re fundamentally understood by teenage athletes as a pathway to a professional career, 2) the transfer portal, which means that if a player is able to raise his stature while playing for, say, the Minnesota Gophers, he now will be able to move up to a more prestigious program at the drop of a hat, and 3) players can now monetize themselves through the NIL (name, image and likeness) program and obviously than can make more money at Michigan or Ohio State than they can make at Minnesota. In short, the pecking order that was once described as the Big 2 and the Little 8 has become vastly more ingrained in our sporting culture than it ever was before. The structure of college sports has been altered to almost assure that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
And, guess what!? The Minnesota Gopher basketball program enters into this brave new world in the middle of a historical downer. So add that to all the other factors that make Minnesota, well, not a factor in the world of college basketball. Winning in the Big 10 has always been tough. Right now it’s tougher than ever. And the Gophers now confront the tougher-than-ever Big 10 looking up from 14th place.
You may be familiar with European soccer, where the professional leagues are organized into Tier I and Tier II. In English soccer, the teams are organized into those 2 tiers. You can’t win a title if you’re not in Tier I. Each year, the last place team in Tier I moves down and the first place team in Tier II moves up. So it might be with the Big 10 with its new total of 18 teams. Tier I might be Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, USC, UCLA, Oregon, Washington, Michigan State and, say, Iowa or Wisconsin. By way of analogy with English soccer, the 9th place team in Tier I would move down to Tier II, and the top team in Tier II would move up to Tier I. So this year, maybe Iowa moves down and Wisconsin moves up. Next year, Wisconsin moves back down and Iowa moves back up. The point is that, whether you actually have a structure like that or not, the process of trying to move up in the pecking order among young student-athletes will be exactly that laborious. For a team like Minnesota, you might have to put five or six winning seasons together before anybody notices, and before your blue-chippers don’t transfer to Ohio State the first chance they get. It’s going to be a long and difficult slog.