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No Bonuses for Gophers Coach Pitino

Posted on March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 by David Shama

This season Gophers basketball coach Richard Pitino won’t earn any incentive bonuses tied to his team’s on-court performances. The coach’s contract with the University of Minnesota includes many potential bonuses including $25,000 for winning the Big Ten Conference Tournament, but the Gophers were eliminated from the tourney in Chicago last night. Minnesota defeated Rutgers on Wednesday but lost to Ohio State last evening.

The Gophers had a disappointing season after winning last year’s NIT championship and returning four starters. Expectations in 2015 were for an NCAA Tournament invitation and winning record in the Big Ten. Instead the Gophers finished 6-12 in regular season league games and won’t be considered for an NCAA invite with their 18-15 overall record. Pitino’s contract guarantees him a $50,000 bonus for a winning record in the Big Ten and the same amount if the Gophers are regular season conference champs.

There are no bonuses for postseason tournaments other than the NCAA tourney. Pitino can earn $50,000 for getting his team into the NCAA tourney, $50,000 for making the Sweet 16, $50,000 for the Final Four, and $100,000 for winning the national championship.

Contract incentives also include $25,000 for being honored as Big Ten Coach of the Year and $50,000 for National Coach of the Year.

Pitino didn’t earn any of the above mentioned bonuses this year or last. Pitino’s 2013-2014 team, his first at Minnesota, finished with an 8-10 record in the Big Ten. That group was considered an overachieving team that won seven of its last eight games including five straight to win the NIT title.

This season’s team, led by five seniors, has lost six of the last eight games. Among gloomy experiences were road and away losses to Penn State, and a home loss to Northwestern—two of the Big Ten’s historically worst programs.

The Gophers lost eight conference games by six points or less. Pitino has said the team hasn’t been lucky at times and he is correct, but the Gophers’ defensive failures have been a cause of misfortune. Minnesota hasn’t been able to correct its season long weakness in defending three point shooting, has been in ineffective at making key defensive stops, and sometimes been overmatched in defensive rebounding.

With the seniors leaving the program, the Gophers’ starting lineup, and certainly the roster, is somewhat of a mystery for next season. Pitino has scholarships to work with this spring and one source close to the program predicted at least two new players will be added, perhaps a small and power forward.

Pitino, 32, was hired by athletic director Norwood Teague in the spring of 2013. The contract he and University representatives signed in May of that year stated a base salary of $500,000 per year and supplemental compensation (for media, fundraising, community involvement and more) of $700,000. Annual salary increases are subject to evaluation by the University.

Worth Noting

Gophers leading scorer Andre Hollins made five of nine field goal attempts in the first half of last Sunday’s final regular season game against Penn State, then went 0-5 for in the second half. In Wednesday night’s opening Big Ten Tournament win over Rutgers he was 0-5 from the floor, and then last evening made four of 14 field goal attempts. That’s a four of 24 shooting slump for the senior guard who has been one of Minnesota’s best players for four years.

Despite a career low batting average of .277 last season, Joe Mauer still compares favorably with other hitters past and present. Among active players, Mauer’s .319 lifetime average is second only to Albert Pujols at .320. For career batting averages since 1950 among major leaguers, Mauer ranks seventh. His on-base percentage of .402 is third among today’s players, trailing Joey Votto at .427 and Miguel Cabrera, .411.

Ervin Santana, the right-handed veteran pitcher who the Twins signed as a free agent last December, could be the staff ace and is capable of being dominant. Twelve times during his 10 season MLB career he has produced double-digit strikeouts in a game. In seven starts for the Braves last season from July 18-August 18 he had a six-game win streak, going 6-0 with a 2.98 ERA.

Coach Don Lucia’s Gophers hockey team plays its last two regular season games tonight and Saturday evening at Mariucci Arena with second place Minnesota one point behind first place Michigan State in the Big Ten standings. The Gophers are defending conference champions, and in 2012 and 2013 Minnesota won WCHA regular season titles.

This weekend’s series will be the final two games at Mariucci Arena for six seniors. Seth Ambroz, Travis Boyd, Christian Isackson, Ben Marshall, Kyle Rau and Sam Warning comprise one of the most successful classes in program history with three straight regular season conference titles (a Gophers men’s record) and two trips to the NCAA Frozen Four. A second consecutive Big Ten title would make the senior class the only group at Minnesota to win regular season titles in each of four years together. Their record is 101-42-15 (.687), including 60-13-7 (.812) at Mariucci Arena.

Bemidji State, Bowling Green, Lake Superior State, Minnesota State, Michigan Tech and Northern Michigan are teams participating in this weekend’s opening round of the WCHA men’s hockey playoffs. Rosters include many Minnesotans such as Bemidji State freshman Michael Bitzer (Moorhead High School) who leads WCHA goalies in save percentage (.932) and is tied for second in goals against average (1.76). Bitzer was honored yesterday as the WCHA Rookie of the Year. Bowling Green junior goalie Tommy Burke (Academy of Holy Angels) is seventh in both save percentage (.919) and goals against average (2.19).

Minnesota State forward C.J. Franklin (Forest Lake) is second among freshmen scorers with 24 points. Senior teammate Zach Palmquist (South St. Paul) is second in scoring among WCHA defensemen with 26 points.

Former Gophers basketball assistant coach Dan Kosmoski has his St. Olaf men’s team (23-5) in the Division III Sweet 16 with a game tonight against Marietta in Rock Island, Illinois. The Oles have won a school record number of games for one season and can play Saturday against either Augustana or Mount Union if they win tonight. A Saturday win sends the Oles to the Division III Final Four.

Automated telephone calls were made to the public this week urging recipients to contact state legislators regarding a bill to reverse Minnesota State High School League transgender policy. League officials voted in December for transgender athletes to play on the school teams best aligned with their gender identity.

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Gophers’ Postseason Future Not Clear

Posted on March 11, 2015March 11, 2015 by David Shama

Gophers seniors Elliott Eliason, Andre Hollins, Kendal Shell and Mo Walker have already played in two National Invitation Tournaments during their college careers. They and their teammates might have to win a couple of Big Ten Tournament games this week to get another invitation—even if that “ticket” isn’t exactly coveted.

The Gophers, the No. 11 conference tourney seed, play No. 14 seed Rutgers tonight in Chicago. Minnesota finished 6-12 in the Big Ten and is 17-14 overall. The Gophers have lost five of their last six games and overall have a lackluster resume.

The cold truth is the NIT Selection Committee might not want the Gophers. Nixing an invite will be made easier if Minnesota loses to Rutgers and finishes its schedule with a 17-15 record. Rutgers, 2-16 during its first season of Big Ten basketball, is 10-21 overall and has lost 14 consecutive games. Last year Indiana had a 17-15 overall record and was left out of the 32-team NIT team field.

The next postseason step down from the NIT is the College Basketball Invitational, a lesser quality 16-team tournament created in 2007. Invites to the CBI aren’t always accepted and the suspicion here is the Gophers would say no—thereby ending a disappointing season that saw them start 0-5 in the Big Ten, lose their last regular season game at the buzzer and disappoint a fan base who thought a team with four starters returning from the 2014 NIT champs could earn its way into the NCAA Tournament.

Instead, the Gophers haven’t been as good as either they or the fans expected. Minnesota was mostly competitive in Big Ten play but lost eight conference games by six points or less. The latest heartbreaker came Sunday when Penn State’s D.J. Newbill hit a three-pointer as time expired to break a 76-76 tie.

Nobody blamed Gophers freshman guard Nate Mason for not doing all he could to defend Newbill but often the team hasn’t made defensive stops in close games when it should have. “We have defensive lapses,” Hollins said.

After the game coach Richard Pitino was frustrated about his team. “I think they’re playing really, really hard. I really do. I feel bad for the seniors that they go out with a loss like that.”

Could the Gophers look forward to playing in the NIT? “I don’t know,” Pitino answered on Sunday. “I think they’re looking toward playing in the conference tournament.”

In the locker room Sunday the gloom was in contrast to the sunny weather outside. Hollins admitted an NIT encore for a third time in four years would be difficult. “I don’t know. I am a competitor. I like playing, so I don’t want my career to end on a bad note. I am not even thinking about that (the NIT).”

When Eliason was asked about the NIT he said he “wouldn’t be too excited about that.” Walker, though, put a smiley face on another NIT. “Yeah, sure. I just want to play for as long as possible this season. Whoever it is, I want to play as much basketball as possible. I am never going to get this opportunity back.”

To earn an invitation to the NCAA Tournament the Gophers have to win five games in five days in the Big Ten Tournament and emerge as tourney champs. That would be the most improbable of stories but an NIT invite is at least possible—even if it wasn’t what the Gophers had in mind back in January.

“It’s not a real entitled group so I don’t think they’re above anything,” Pitino said. “Nor should they be, and I guess we’re just focused on the conference tournament right now.”

Worth Noting

Big Ten Conference statistics show the Gophers weren’t effective defensively. Minnesota ranked 12th in both scoring defense and field goal percentage defense, and last in three-point field goal percentage defense among 14 teams.

The last part of the season Pitino allocated more playing time to 6-9 Gaston Diedhiou and 6-11 Bakary Konate. Both are freshmen who have potential but also much to learn. Pitino played the two together for a few minutes against Wisconsin last week. Next season they could be on the floor together a lot. “They’re certainly going to be a major part of it next year,” Pitino said.

The Gophers, who sold out four games last season at Williams Arena, sold out only one in 2014-2015, the Wisconsin game. Minnesota finished ninth among league teams in average home attendance for Big Ten games. The Gophers averaged 13,013 for nine home games, finishing ahead of Michigan, Northwestern, Penn State, Purdue and Rutgers.

Bryan Green, the father of highly recruited East Ridge High School quarterback Seth Green, has moved the family to the Dallas area because of a job change. Seth, once considered one of the top Minnesota prep football recruits for the class of 2016, will play his senior season for Allen High School in Allen, Texas. Green has verbally committed to Oregon.

The opinion here is Eden Prairie High School junior linebacker Carter Coughlin, who has said he will announce his college choice soon, will choose the Gophers. Coughlin, could be the state’s best senior next fall.

Next Monday Vikings fans who have signed up on a waitlist can start touring the New Stadium Preview Center. Up until Monday, tours at the downtown center are only for existing season ticket holders. The new domed stadium is on target to open in 2016.

Bryant Allen, who played for both the Gophers football and basketball teams during the 2009-2010 school year, is a starting senior guard on the Dakota State basketball team playing this afternoon in a first round Division II NAIA national tournament game against the College of Idaho. Allen, 24, was at Illinois State before transferring to the NAIA school located in Madison, South Dakota.

Vikings special teams coach Mike Priefer, South Dakota head coach Joe Glenn and former NFL player and motivational author Joe Ehrmann will be headline speakers at the Minnesota Football Clinic. Priefer speaks March 26 while Glenn and Ehrmann will talk March 27 at the DoubleTree Hotel in St. Louis Park. The clinic is March 26-28 and is a partnership between the Minnesota Football Coaches Association and the Gophers.

Torii Hunter empathizes with Angels outfielder Josh Hamilton in a March 2 USA Today story in which the Twins right fielder acknowledges the drug habit of his 64-year-old father Theotis. Hamilton was recently suspended for a drug relapse. Hunter told USA Today’s Bob Nightengale his dad has been hooked on drugs almost as long as he can remember. “It’s like a demon that takes you over,” Hunter said in the story.

A lot of people in baseball and beyond sympathize with the horrors of drug abuse. New Twins manager Paul Molitor can speak from personal experience. Ron Simon, Molitor’s agent as a young major league baseball player, wrote about his client’s problem with cocaine in Simon’s 1993 book The Game, Behind the Game, Negotiating in the Big Leagues.

“The police were called to my house on Christmas Day, 1980,” Simon wrote. “They had to break in to see if Paul Molitor was inside, dead or alive. Molitor was in my house, sleeping off a wild night of cocaine abuse.”

Simon wrote in his book Molitor stopped using cocaine after that memorable night. Since then Molitor has talked to others about what he went through, sharing his experience.

Dick Miller, a tackle on the Gophers’ 1960 national championship football team and former athlete at Rochester Lourdes High School, will be inducted into the Rochester Quarterbacks Club Hall of Fame on April 20. The club president is long time Rochester radio sports commentator Ed Rauen.

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Book Reminds Why Sports Inspire

Posted on February 25, 2015February 25, 2015 by David Shama

Sometimes I am reminded why sports has played such a prominent role in my life. My latest wakeup call was prompted by reading Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by the late Stephen Jay Gould. Gould’s 2003 book consists of essays he wrote about his lifelong passion for baseball that appeared in publications like the New York Times. Gould was a paleontologist but his intelligent musings about his baseball love affair introduced him to another audience.

A Harvard intellectual, Gould grew up in New York City in the 1940’s and 1950’s, a golden era for baseball in New York. He watched his beloved Yankees in the World Series almost every year. He saw baseball gods like Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle from the Yankees, and the Giants Willie Mays and the Dodgers Jackie Robinson.

Although Gould died from cancer in 2002 at age 60, his passion for baseball over a period of seven decades lives on, and his essays stirred something in me. As I read his book, I realized how the great and rare moments of sports have impacted my being while both enriching and frustrating my life.

I say frustrated because slogging through the mediocre and miserable performances of many teams and athletes year after year is no fun. It’s an experience that lessens my fervor for spectator sports and creates both apathy and anger that my sports world has frequently fallen on hard times.

The last great ride for me came in the autumn of 2009 watching Brett Favre. The legendary quarterback was 40 but in his first season with the Vikings he threw darts where no balls had any right to go. His statistics included career bests in completions (68.4 percent) and passer rating (107.2).

The Saints won the postseason’s dirty play of the year award with their shameless diving at Favre’s legs. Then the Vikings screwed themselves late in that infamous NFC championship game by killing a chance to win after being penalized for having 12 players on the field.

The Humpty Dumpty end to the season and Super Bowl chase couldn’t spoil my satisfaction in watching the old gunslinger will the Vikings to one of their best seasons ever. No Vikings quarterback since scramblin’ Fran Tarkenton in the 1960’s had brought such entertainment as Favre. Tarkenton—who seemingly could run away from tacklers so long you had time to make a sandwich—brought that rare skill level and excitement that we’ve seen too little of in this town.

Where have you gone, Kirby Puckett? The center fielder told teammates they should jump on his back because he would carry the Twins. Perhaps he never carried the load better than when his game six winning home run forced a seventh game in the 1991 World Series against the Braves. “And we’ll see you tomorrow night,” TV’s Jack Buck told the world.

The Twins unexpectedly won both the 1987 and 1991 World Series, the only two MLB titles in franchise history. The nation watched when Twins heroes like Puckett and pitchers Frank Viola and Jack Morris showed they were World Series competitors and heroes for the ages.

For the ages? Coach Herb Brooks and his 1980 Winter Olympics players are at the head of that line. Miracles are not forgotten and the US Hockey team’s 1980 gold medal triumph at Lake Placid still stirs emotions of all sorts including national pride. The best moment, of course, was America’s stunning upset of the Soviet Union. The US team consisted of amateurs while the Red Machine was capable of playing in the National Hockey League.

For years the Soviet Union had tried to bully America politically. Premier Nikita Khrushchev had long ago proclaimed, “We will bury you.” In 1980 America had lost prestige in the world and at home. When the Soviet hockey team humiliated the US in an exhibition game prior to the Olympics, America shrugged its collective shoulders and hung its head lower. But the US Hockey team’s semi-final ground-shattering triumph had Al Michaels asking the TV audience: “Do you believe in miracles?” Americans found new swagger and confidence about their country and themselves. The stunning upset and later gold medal win in February of 1980—35 years ago—helped jumpstart an American comeback at home and on the world stage that saw the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union empire.

Those who had known Brooks for many years may have been surprised by how far the former Gophers coach led the US team but they weren’t completely caught off-guard. The St. Paul native led the Gophers to national championships in 1974, 1976 and 1979. It was the greatest period ever for Gophers hockey.

The 1970’s and the immediate decades before delivered a scrapbook full of great sports memories for Minnesotans. Bud Grant’s four Super Bowl teams set the standard for a franchise that is still trying to climb back to the biggest stage. Tarkenton, Eller, Page, Marshall. Their jerseys are still worn by fans and their images are forever remembered.

Bill Musselman’s Gophers basketball teams created an electric environment in Williams Arena with their pre-game Harlem Globetrotters routine during the 1970’s. The coach got in trouble with NCAA rules but he ignited a passion inside Williams Arena that’s never been duplicated. The highlight of the Musselman era was the 1972 Big Ten championship team that included NBA first round draft choices Ron Behagen and Jim Brewer, and baseball Hall of Famer Dave Winfield.

The Twins Rod Carew flirted with baseball’s immortals when he chased a .400 batting average and graced the cover of Time Magazine in 1977. The sweet swinging Carew was hitting over .400 in early summer of that memorable season before finishing at .388.

The Twins were an American League power in the 1960s led by a wrecking crew of home run sluggers captained by the great Harmon Killebrew. Long ball baseball put an excitement on the field during that era which the Twins have never duplicated. The team high point was reaching the World Series in 1965. Invincible pitcher Sandy Koufax and the Dodgers were too much for the Twins in their first Minnesota World Series appearance.

The Gophers made two trips to the Rose Bowl in the early 1960’s. The second time they got it right with a 21-3 win over UCLA. The glory of that win, though, didn’t match the Gophers winning the 1960 national championship. That was Minnesota’s seventh and perhaps last national title. The Gophers, led by legendary coach Bernie Bierman, won national championships in 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940 and 1941. Coach Henry Williams also led Minnesota to a national title in 1904.

Bierman’s titles came before another glorious run in Minnesota. The Minneapolis Lakers dominated pro basketball from the late 1940’s through 1954, winning five world titles and boasting pro basketball’s first superstar. George Mikan, the giant 6-10 center, was so revered that he was commonly called Mr. Basketball. When the Lakers once played in New York’s famous Madison Square Garden, the marquee said “George Mikan vs. the Knicks.”

Olympic gold, national championships, world titles, men named Bierman, Brooks, Carew, Favre, Grant, Killebrew, Mikan and Puckett. Whew! That’s the kind of high life this town knew.

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