Our non-conference

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Dano564

Dano564

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What's puzzling to me is during the non-conference season, (and yes, it's non-conference) we played well and went 3-0. Now NMSU is horrific, but the point that they won all three was something many Big Ten teams didn't do. (Purdue, Northwestern, Wisconsin, etc).

So logic would have you think, "Oh, well we played all really easy teams".

NMSU - horrible, won by wide margin. Move on.

Miami - nothing special, but since we played Miami, Miami has gone 3-2 with two one point losses against WMU and Army with a wide margin win over Akron who had beat Northwestern.

Fresno St has only been on a tear since they lost to us, so they haven't turned out to be some fluke team either. They've won almost every other game by over 20 points.


So either playing on the road is killing this team or playing without Winfield matters THAT much (which would be pretty sad in a way), or our guys just get intimidated by conference opponents.
 

I was pondering this today as well. FSU was a very quality win. Miami is a decent team as well, as you pointed out. I don't have any answers, but I think the biggest difference has been the defense getting exposed in conference play. Offense has performed fairly consistently all year.

I don't know how the D stopped FSU...I truly don't. Anyone care to comment on this schematically? Maybe FSU just laid an egg...long road trip, night game for a West coast team, etc. But if it was due to the Gophers playing well, how is that explainable? Winfield was in, obviously. Were other key players available who have since gone out...was it the combination of players available? Shenault was playing his natural position, so I suppose that helped. But I'm scratching my head on this one.

As for Miami, they lost their two biggest offensive weapons fairly early in the game, if I recall. I'm sure that slowed them down quite a bit. D still rose to the occasion on many drives. Just a few days later they looked horrendous and morphed into the unit we've seen almost every week since. What in the world happened besides Winfield going out?
 

Fresno is a quality team.
Miami is on par with Rutgers, if that.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

MGGopher said:
I was pondering this today as well. FSU was a very quality win. Miami is a decent team as well, as you pointed out. I don't have any answers, but I think the biggest difference has been the defense getting exposed in conference play. Offense has performed fairly consistently all year.

I don't know how the D stopped FSU...I truly don't. Anyone care to comment on this schematically? Maybe FSU just laid an egg...long road trip, night game for a West coast team, etc. But if it was due to the Gophers playing well, how is that explainable? Winfield was in, obviously. Were other key players available who have since gone out...was it the combination of players available? Shenault was playing his natural position, so I suppose that helped. But I'm scratching my head on this one.

As for Miami, they lost their two biggest offensive weapons fairly early in the game, if I recall. I'm sure that slowed them down quite a bit. D still rose to the occasion on many drives. Just a few days later they looked horrendous and morphed into the unit we've seen almost every week since. What in the world happened besides Winfield going out?
Click to expand...

Maybe it a home game vs road game thing.

Our Iowa home game wasn't good but at least that's a "good" team that we lost to. (better than Neb and Maryland).
 

I don’t think Winfield is THAT GOOD. But I do think the difference between him and his replacement is huge. When Winfield went down I went from thinking 7-9 wins to thinking 5-7.

Our backup safeties can’t hang with spread offenses. Unfortunately, our 50/50 games are almost all spreads:
Maryland
Nebraska
Indiana
Purdue
Illinois
Northwestern

We could matchup better with a non spread team right now but the only one we will get to play is Wisconsin and they are much better than us.
 


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