Pat Forde: Gophers go from Flavor of Month to Bust of Month

And the Gophers? They plummeted from Flavor of the Month in October to Bust of the Month in November, losing their last four games. The final defeat, a 55-0 humiliation in the Floyd Bowl against Iowa, should have been enough to remove Tim Brewster's name from the Hot Coach list. In retrospect, Minnesota's 7-5 record is a house of cards. Best victory: over Illinois, No. 57 in the Sagarin Ratings.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&page=dash0813&sportCat=ncf

Go Gophers!!

As much as the Gopher fan in me wants to call him a bunch of names and say that he doesn't have a clue what he is talking about, the cold hard truth is it's really tough to really argue with what he wrote. At least we get a bowl game as an opportunity to wash that 55-0 taste out of our mouth. It would be a really long time until spring practice if the team was already packing up equipment and heading home for the holidays.

but in the preseason we were ranked in the "Bottom Ten" at espn--so i could care less what they think.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/preview08/news/story?page=bottom1008preseason

number eight actually, so i'd say we've come a long way.

He's right. And yet, we still surpassed expectations.

The last time we did this, in 2002, we were coming off a 4-7 (2-6) season. Started off 7-1 and got bulldozed in our last four games. Went into the bowl game a big underdog to a ranked Arkansas team, and manhandled them. Set us up for a big run in 2003. I can inly hope we do the same thing six years later, starting with the bowl game next month.