The Minnesota Golden Gophers are on pace to win the national title, and quarterback Tanner Morgan is all set to claim the Heisman trophy; just like we all predicted.
In all seriousness though, there is no reason to not to have optimism about the Gophers’ chances of getting off to an 8-0 start. Of course, then reality sinks in with the back-to-back games against Penn State and Iowa, both currently ranked in the top 15. It’s like Minnesota’s schedule is a reverse mullet- business in the back, party in the front.
Still there’s a reason I pegged Minnesota my sleeper pick this season, as I do think they’re going to finish around 9-3 when all is said and done.
.@PaulMBanks has a sleeper team in the Big Ten for the 2019 season, and he told that to @paytonsun on Sunday's Sports Feed. See more of his discussion on the upcoming college football campaign here: https://t.co/qXow5wtgoM pic.twitter.com/XuGGIw20qc
— @CLTVSportsFeed (@CLTVSportsFeed) August 19, 2019
Illinois Fighting Illini at Minnesota Golden Gophers FYIs
Saturday, Oct. 5, 2019 | 2:30 pm CT
TCF Bank Stadium, Minneapolis, Minn.
BTN | Fox Sports App (Kevin Kugler, Matt Millen
Spread, over/under: 14, 59 o/u
Big Ten Basketball Media Day Power Rankings: go to this link
Radio segment, Severe and Benning, 1620 The Zone, KOZN Omaha:
Minnesota Golden Gophers (4-0, 1-0) Preview
The Gophers, who got 15 votes in the AP poll this week, are the first Big Ten team to win each of their first four games by a single possession since Amos Alonzo Stagg’s Chicago Maroons in 1915. So there you go, P.J. Fleck in the same category as A.A. Stagg.
The last team from an conference to accomplish that feat was 1985 Penn State. As Fleck prepares to face the flagship school of his home state, it’s worth noting that his named had been tossed around with the Illini job while Bill Cubit and Tim Beckman were in charge and he was still at Western Michigan.
It would have been difficult to imagine Illinois hiring WMU’s coach back-to-back though. While the timing was off for any chance of Fleck coaching the Illini, his Gophers are the classic example of a team where the strongest position group is coincidentally where their coach used to line up in his playing days.
The Gophers’ WRs are fierce and they can burn just about anybody on the slant route. Or they can switch it up with the deceptively named sluggo (slant-and-go). They run routes similar to a post and post-corner and the results speak for themselves.
Morgan completed 21-of-22 passes at Purdue last week and his 95.45 completion percentage is the highest in the history of the Big Ten for anyone who has attempted 13 or more passes in a game.
Morgan also set career highs in completions (21), yards (396) and touchdowns (4) on Saturday.
His 396 yards are tied for the seventh-most in school history and are the most by a Minnesota quarterback since Adam Weber threw for 416 yards in a win against Michigan State in 2009.
However, there is a lot of cause for concern this week on the other side of the ball. Purdue ran it pretty well on Minnesota last week, and the Boilermakers hadn’t previously been able to run it all on anyone.
Remember, Illinois put up an astronomical 430 rushing yards on Minnesota last year, including 213 yards from Reggie Corbin on just 13 carries. A performance remotely close to that again this year would propel the Illini to the big two touchdown upset.
Illinois Fighting Illini (2-2, 0-1) Preview
Lovie Smith is 2-23 versus non-Rutgers Big Ten teams (i.e. vs. his own conference) and if you’re reading this, you already know one of those two (last year’s meeting between these two teams where the Gophers fell 55-31 in Champaign. A November home win versus 2016 Michigan State, a team that absolutely packed it in by midseason, was the other.
The Lovie experiment failed, and there are a whole lot of reasons for that, but here are two biggies: he whiffed badly on both of his initial coordinator hires. Smith couldn’t seem to land anyone that he really wanted this off-season so now he’s performing this gig, in addition to head coaching duties.
It’s not going well, as they surrendered almost 700 yards last time out to a mediocre Nebraska team.
They also couldn’t stop Eastern Michigan whenever it really counted and that loss has pretty much squashed their bowl hopes. It’s too bad Illinois doesn’t have a defense, because their offense is pretty good.
Illinois has scored 30+ points in each of the first four games this season, and Brandon Peters is the best QB Lovie has had in Champaign. You’ve seen Peters play, so you know that he won’t be contending for All-Big Ten or anything, but you’d still take him over anyone else Smith has put under center.
Under Peters the Illini are averaging 35.5 points per game in this the second year of OC Rod Smith. The Illini averaged 26 points per game in Smith’s first season, and that was a big increase from the putrid 15.4 ppg in 2017.
The current four game streak of 30+ points is tied for the third-longest streak in program history and is the first since a program-record seven-game streak to end the Big Ten championship 2001 season (includes the Sugar Bowl where the Illini did almost all of their scoring in garbage time).
Smith’s buyout at the end of the year is $4 million, and should they finish 4-8, or worse, one has to wonder if Athletic Director Josh Whitman will exercise it.
Probably not, as Whitman seems stubbornly committed to believing in Smith, despite the results providing no justification for doing so. Also, the buyout drops to $2 million after next season, then just $1 million for the last two years of the deal.
It’s painfully obvious that Whitman swung and missed on this hire, big time, but there’s no sense in pulling the plug until you have a real plan in place on the next guy.
Prediction: Minnesota Golden Gophers 52, Illinois Fighting Illini 28
As Run-DMC would say “it’s tricky tricky tricky” to play the massive spreads like these. That’s because garbage time comes so early in the contest, and you just don’t know what’s going to happen with the guys who come in during mop-up time.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
You can follow Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com on Twitter here and his cat on Instagram at this link.