The last time it happened was 1960. No internet, no streaming, no ESPN. No instant replays on the black-and-white TV. No Vikings.
The sports news landed on the porch on Sunday mornings in the Minneapolis Tribune. The Sports “Peach” section featured page after page of photo sequences showing the previous day’s big plays. In case you had trouble discerning the crucial details in the fuzzy photos printed on a letterpress, artists added arrows and circles pointing to the football and key players.
In 1960, college football was the big fall sport. The NFL was not the billion-dollar enterprise it is today.
And 1960 was the last time the Minnesota Gophers football team started the season 7-0…until this year. The Gophers earned their first berth in the Rose Bowl by winning the 1960 Big Ten title. After a loss to Washington, the Gophers returned to the Rose Bowl the next year and beat UCLA.
Here we are in 2019 and the Gophers are now 9-0 after beating Maryland and fourth-ranked Penn State to improve their 7-0 record.
In 1960, the Big Ten actually had 10 teams, not 14. Now the Gophers are leading the Big Ten West. They have a two-game lead with three to go, and their first Rose Bowl bid since 1961 is well within reach. First up, the Gophers travel to Iowa City to play the Hawkeyes, who have beaten Minnesota the last four years. The next game is at Northwestern. The Wildcats haven’t won a conference game this season. The season finishes at home against Wisconsin.
The ring of honor in TCF Bank Stadium lists the dates for past glory, but it’s embarrassing. The list of Big Ten championships ends in 1967. The Gophers claim seven national championships: 1904, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940, 1941 and 1960.
Golden Gopher football does have a long, grand tradition, just not in the last 60 years. Founded in 1882, the program is one of the oldest in college football. Minnesota has been a member of the Big Ten Conference since its inception in 1896 as the Western Conference. In 1890, the Gophers played host to Wisconsin in a 63–0 victory. With the exception of 1906, the Gophers and Badgers have played each other every year since then, the most-played rivalry in major college football.
The Gophers played the games of the glory years in Memorial Stadium. The team left their crumbling, historic home for the Metrodome in 1981. Games in the off-campus bubble lacked the traditional feel of a college football game, but at least it didn’t rain or snow inside.
In 2009, the Gophers moved back to campus with the opening of TCF Bank Stadium. First-year sellout crowds dwindled after teams underperformed.
When the Brew Crew started 2010 with a 1-6 start, the university fired coach Tim Brewster. Jerry Kill followed and he was building a successful program. An illness forced him from the sidelines and Tracy Claeys followed. He was canned after he fumbled accusations of sexual assault against a group of players.
Now there’s P.J. Fleck, who popped up on the university’s radar three years ago when he took Western Michigan to the Cotton Bowl and the team ended their season with a 13-1 record.
Fleck is a high-energy crafter of culture with his hokey “Row the Boat” mantra. He thinks of himself as an educator and football as his platform to make the world a better place by making his players better men. But like every big-time college coach, his real job is to put Ws on the scoreboard and fans in the seats. Winning does that. The Penn State crowd of 52,000 was the first sellout in four years.
The 31-26 win over Penn State was the first time the Gophers beat a top-five team in 20 years….when they beat the Nittany Lions 24-20 on a last-second field goal in 1999.
This year’s game was no less thrilling than the 1999 matchup. Penn State’s quarterback threw for what would have been a game-winning touchdown but Minnesota’s Jordan Howden intercepted the pass in the end zone to effectively end the game with a minute to go. At the final whistle, fans poured onto the field.
The week before playing Penn State, Fleck signed a seven-year contract extension with a $10 million buyout that will likely keep him off the market and away from Florida State and Southern California.
The Gophers are now ranked No. 7 in the nation in both the Associated Press and Coaches’ Poll, the team’s highest ranking since 1962.
No matter what happens in the next three weeks, the Gophers are playing their best football since Eisenhower was president. And fittingly, Fleck has the best winning percentage of a Gopher coach since Bernie Bierman, and he last coached in 1950.