AP: "Tubby Smith rebuilds Minnesota basketball"


Nice article from AP on Tubby Smith and the Minnesota program. It's always great to see the program getting recognized nationally. If we can pull a win on the road in Madison, it would send shockwaves across the conference and country cause of Wisky's awesome home record.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/news?slug=ap-t25-minnesotarising&prov=ap&type=lgns

The AP writer may not know it but Minnesota has a very proud basketball tradition except for a few years in the early to mid 2K's and scandal of the late 90's.

In my 40 years of following Big 10 basketball, the Gophers always presented tough opposition, especially at home.
 

The AP writer may not know it but Minnesota has a very proud basketball tradition except for a few years in the early to mid 2K's and scandal of the late 90's.

In my 40 years of following Big 10 basketball, the Gophers always presented tough opposition, especially at home.

While I agree that for the most part we've been tough at home, in the last 30 years, we've officially finished better than 4th in BT exactly once--the 81-82 championship team. (We also did better in some of the years where our record was wiped out.)

Since 1920 (doubt many on here go back that far!) the only Gopher coaches to have a better than .500 cumulative record in the big ten are Ozzie Cowles in the 50's (pretty consistently good teams but no championships,) John Kundla (two excellent but not championship teams in the Lou Hudson days, but under .500 in total for his other 7 years,) and Bill Musselman (good record over 4 years, but...) Dutch would be a bit over .500 if 76-77 hadn't been wiped out.


In fact, even if you only count in Clem's record the games that weren't wiped out (in other words, don't count the wiped out games against him,) Monson's big ten record, abyssmal as it was, is in the top half of all gopher bball coaches (not counting Tubby's partial tenure one way or the other.)

Tubby has a good opportunity to have the best big ten record of any gophers' bball coach in history, and I think he will.
 




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