Can the Football Gophers Win Them All in 2014?
By Sam Utterberg
Murphy News Service
It has been going on 50 years since the Minnesota Gophers football team possessed all three of the coveted trophies for which they compete annually with the universities of Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin.
The Little Brown Jug. Floyd of Rosedale. Paul Bunyan’s Axe. Can this year’s team bring home all three for the first time since 1967? That’s the last time it was done, when the Gophers also won the Big Ten championship.
Step No. 1 to a “Yes” answer came when Minnesota beat the Michigan Wolverines 30-14 in Ann Arbor on Oct. 4 to take back the Little Brown Jug and improve to 4-1 on the season.
The Gophers now stand at 6-2 and the next game on their schedule will be step No. 2 at home Saturday, Nov. 8, against Iowa and the chance to send the Hawkeyes back to Iowa City without Floyd of Rosedale in tow.
The Minnesota and Iowa series has been balanced since 1967. And Floyd of Rosedale was rated as the best trophy game in college football by Rivals.com in 2008 because of the balanced nature of the series.
The Gophers have scored 982 points against Iowa since 1967, while the Hawkeyes have scored 1,167 points on the Gophers in the same period of time. The series record since 1967: 25-21-1 in favor of Iowa.
The Hawkeyes have gotten the best of the Gophers over the last two years. In Iowa City in 2012, Iowa defeated Minnesota 31-13 behind 177 rushing yards from RB Mark Weisman.
In Minneapolis last year the Hawkeyes again defeated Minnesota for the Gophers’ homecoming, this time with 147 rushing yards from RB Mark Weisman.
The 6-foot, 240-pound Weisman and the Hawkeyes return to Minneapolis in 2014, this time in his senior season.
The Hawkeyes, 2-1 in Big Ten competition and 5-2 overall, needed all 60 minutes of football to defeat Ball State on Sept. 6. And the team fell to Iowa State at home the next weekend. Even the first game of the season against Northern Iowa, an FCS team, was an unconvincing 8-point win. The Gophers are coming off a damaging upset loss, at Illinois, while Iowa lost to Big Ten newcomer Maryland the weekend of Oct. 18. And the Hawkeyes must get past Northwestern at home on Saturday, Nov. 1, prior to coming up to play Minnesota the following week.
So, putting Floyd of Rosedale considerations aside, it will be a crucial game for both teams.
Step No. 3 in securing all three trophies will come against the Wisconsin Badgers in Madison on Nov. 29.
If Minnesota loses to Iowa, then the quest for all three falls moot. But if all three trophies are still in play as the Gophers go to Madison, the team will face a Paul Bunyan-sized task of toppling the Badgers, a team that is 2-1 in Big 10 play and 5-2 overall. Wisconsin is on a two-game win streak, with convincing victories over Illinois and Maryland. Wisconsin faces the other Big Ten newcomer, Rutgers, Saturday, Nov. 1 in Piscataway, New Jersey.
But most seasoned observers and the record books will tell you that Wisconsin and Iowa have not been the biggest obstacle for the Golden Gophers over the past 40-plus years in their hunted for the trophy trifecta.
The biggest obstacle has always been the Michigan Wolverines, and that hurdle has been cleared.
The Gophers last won 10 games in 2003, when the team last took Paul Bunyan’s Axe back from the Badgers. Minnesota also had a chance to win the Little Brown Jug that year. The Gophers were ahead of the Wolverines 14-0 at halftime and 28-7 going into the 4th quarter, in front of a sellout Metrodome crowd on national television.
“Michigan? Scoreless against Minnesota? It had to be a cruel joke,” Star Tribune columnist Patrick Reusse said from the press box after the game.
“[The Michigan game] made me sick to my stomach to be quite honest with you,” Jeff Maki, 58 year old Gopher fan, said.
The Gophers proceeded to lose the game 38-35, being outscored in the 4th quarter 31-7.
“If we would have won that game, it would have given us the momentum to beat Michigan State,” former Gophers head coach Glen Mason told Pioneer Press beat writer Marcus Fuller. “And then, heck, you might not only have ended up in a Jan. 1 bowl game, you might have ended up in the big one. The Rose Bowl.”
“It was disappointing,” former Athletic Director Joel Maturi told Fuller in expressing maximum understatement.
That loss has served as a microcosm of the all-time series between Minnesota and Michigan.
This year was the just the fifth time in 44 games since 1967 that the Gophers figured out a way to beat Michigan, improving their record to 5-39 against the Wolverines since the Gophers last won a Big Ten Championship. The Gophers have scored 579 points against Michigan since 1967. The Wolverines have scored nearly three times that, 1,584 points, against the Gophers in the same period of time. Minnesota’s average points per game is 13. Michigan’s average is 36.
Minnesota leads the all-time series with Wisconsin 59-56-8. It also leads the Iowa series 61-44-2.
Compared with the Gophers’ Michigan series, 73-25-8 in favor of the Wolverines, it’s not even close. That’s why being over that hurdle keeps Minnesota relevant in the trophy hunt.
Sam Utterberg is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.