The Gopher football program begins its 126th season on Saturday at Syracuse. The program that produced six national championships hasn’t won any since 1960 and during the last 40 years or so has struggled to be anything other than a Big Ten cupcake.
So who can the Gophers emulate to improve their results? Yes, the Hawkeyes and Badgers are easy guesses. Our neighboring states of Iowa and Wisconsin are similar to Minnesota in various ways including so-so high school football talent. In the last 20 years the programs at Iowa and Wisconsin have each won three Big Ten titles. But there’s probably even a better model to stir the hope of long patient Gopher fans. Northwestern, for decades a sorry excuse for a football program, is no longer the “Mildcats,” and may even provide any anti-sports folks at the U something to think about.
At Minnesota the leadership wants to emphasize academics, and also honesty in recruiting. Winning, they will tell you, is important, too. To all of that Northwestern says: check, check and check.
Since 1995 the Wildcats have won three Big Ten championships. Only Ohio State and Penn State have won more titles during that time. The Gophers’ last championship was in 1967. Northwestern went to the Rose Bowl in 2006. Minnesota was there in 1962, the longest absence of any conference school. Since 1993 when Penn State joined the Big Ten and made the conference an 11 team league the Gophers have the 10th worst winning percentage in Big Ten games, with only Indiana doing worse, according to https://www.cleveland.com/datacentral/index.ssf/2008/10/alltime_big_ten_standings_and.html
Northwestern, the Big Ten’s only private school, overcame an embarrassing football reputation with smart coaching and recruiting. First Gary Barnett, then Randy Walker and now 34-year-old Pat Fitzgerald have shown that winning can be accomplished almost any place.
Educational mission? Apparently NU is still on track there. Northwestern was the top ranked school from a BCS conference in America, according to a 2008 Forbes listing of colleges. The criterion included impact of a school’s degree on a career, how much student debt is incurred, quality of the professors, and also national and international reputation of the institution. Northwestern ranked No. 11 among all schools in the listing and Minnesota was the lowest among Big Ten schools at 554.
Last season Northwestern finished 9-4 overall, 5-3 in the Big Ten (last time the Gophers did that was 2003, 10-3, 5-3) and went to the Alamo Bowl. What have the Wildcats done since? Well, at the top of Fitzgerald’s list of talking points at a Big Ten media gathering this summer was academics. Collectively, his players had a 3.0 grade point average for spring semester.
Fitzgerald, who played on the teams that started the Northwestern renaissance in the mid 1990s, has a 10 player leadership council to help make everyone accountable. That and a whole lot of other things seem to be working at Northwestern.
Northwestern won the first of its recent three conference titles in 1995, ending a title drought dating back to 1936. The nine wins last year happened for only the fifth time in school history. “I think we’re just scratching the surface,” Fitzgerald said.
As the Gophers begin a season that has them opening a magnificent new stadium with a third year leader in coach Tim Brewster, scratching the surface and looking to Northwestern for inspiration seems like good advice.