Childress was enthusiastic about wide receiver Troy Williamson earlier this year but so far Williamson has nine receptions for 159 yards and one touchdown.  “I was high on him,” Childress said. “You haven’t seen the production, but if you’re being honest, you haven’t seen the production out of the (entire) pass game.  So he’s a hard guy to single out.”

The Gopher basketball program is second in all-time total NBA players among Big Ten Conference schools. Only Indiana with 51 tops Minnesota at 41 for producing NBA players. The Gophers are eighth in the country, trailing UCLA (70), North Carolina (69), Kentucky (65), Indiana, Duke (48), St. John’s (46) and Kansas (46).

Gophers’ coach Tubby Smith and public address announcer Dick Jonckowski have started a ritual.  Prior to tip-off at each home game, Jonckowski, known for his funny stories, tells Smith a quick anecdote.

The 0-5 Timberwolves, back in Minneapolis after a two-game road trip, try for their first win of the season tonight against Sacramento, 2-5. Guard-forward Ron Artest will make his season debut. He has completed his season opening seven game suspension as a result of legal issues during the 2006-07 season.

The Minnesota Wild has the longest continuous sellout streak of home games in the NHL, 285.  They are playing to 102 percent of capacity.

An NHL source said center Eric Belanger, defenseman Brent Burns and center Mikko Koivu have exceeded expectations so far for the Wild.  Their contributions have been important to the team’s success and the Wild is currently three points behind first place Colorado in the Northwest Division.

If the Chicago White Sox sign Torii Hunter they help themselves and weaken a Central Division rival, the Twins.  It wouldn’t be a mega surprise if Hunter ends up in Chicago, either with the White Sox or Cubs.

With a loss late last week to Whitworth University, the men’s soccer team from Gustavus was unable for the first time since 1993 to reach the second round of the NCAA Division III tournament. Gustavus has qualified for five consecutive NCAA tournaments. The Gusties finished at 16-4-1 and over the years have won four of five MIAC post-season tournaments including this fall. Senior forward Mike Butterworth was named MIAC Player of the Year after leading the Gusties to a share of the regular season title.

Unless the University of Minnesota football team can surprise everyone, the season will end with a school record 11^th loss.  The Gophers could finish at 1-11 overall, 0-8 in the Big Ten Conference with a loss to Wisconsin in the Metrodome on Saturday.

This would be the first time since 1994 that Minnesota has finished alone at the bottom of the conference standings, although the Gophers shared bottom finishes in 1996 and 2001.  In the previous 10 seasons, all under coach Glen Mason, the Gophers’ Big Ten finishes were ninth, seventh, fourth, fourth, 10^th, seventh, fourth, eighth, seventh and sixth.

Last year the Gophers’ conference record was 3-5 (6-7 overall).  As recently as 2003 the Gophers were 5-3 in the Big Ten, finishing in fourth place, with a 10-3 overall record.  Mason and his staff weren’t able to better or equal the annual records beyond that. During his career at Minnesota, Mason’s conference record was 32 wins, 48 losses. When Mason was let go after last year’s Insight Bowl collapse against Texas Tech, the talent he and his staff had on campus was below that of more recent seasons.

This season that talent met a new coaching staff with new ideas and systems.  Coach Tim Brewster and his staff talk about creating a new culture, partially based on attitudes, behaviors and strategies. The results will have a lot to do, too, with how physically gifted the next group of players are that they bring to Minnesota.  The staff’s reputation as superior recruiters is on the line as an impatient public and cynical media watches, and as a new $288.5 million stadium and the expectations that go with it are being readied for 2009.

Coaches in the Big Ten and elsewhere who have turned around programs often have started their projects at ground zero, experiencing bad first year records and sometimes close losses like the Gophers who have lost five games by six points or less. What follows are the tales of other places and coaches.

Kansas State was the outhouse of college football for most of the 20^th century.   A .500 season in Manhattan was as commonplace as March sun bathing in Minneapolis.  The four seasons before Bill Snyder came to Kansas State, the Wildcats won a total of three games.  In 1989, Snyder’s first season, he was 1-10.  After that his program took off and Kansas State became a top 20 program and Big 12 Conference champions.

Northwestern and Kansas State had more in common than the nickname Wildcats before Gary Barnett showed up in Evanston.  The NU “Mildcats” were always a favorite homecoming opponent and hadn’t been to the Rose Bowl since 1949. The three seasons before Barnett’s arrival Northwestern had won three conference games.  Barnett’s 1992-1994 teams were 3-9, 2-9 and 3-7-1, but he preached a “you gotta believe” message.  Then came back-to-back Big Ten championships in 1995 and 1996, the school’s first titles since 1936.

Barry Alvarez is the winningest coach in University of Wisconsin football history. The Badgers had won a total of nine football games in the four seasons before he became Wisconsin’s coach.  He was a loser in his first season in Madison, going 0-8 in the Big Ten, 1-10 overall in 1990.  Two more losing seasons followed and then came a Big Ten championship in 1993.  Alvarez took three teams to the Rose Bowl, winning all his games in Pasadena.  He won three Big Ten championships.

Hayden Fry stared at a miserable statistic when he started his first season as Iowa’s head football coach in 1979: the Hawkeyes had gone 17 consecutive years without a winning season.  After two losing seasons, Fry had Iowa in the Rose Bowl as Big Ten champs.  He went on to win two more conference titles, compiling a record of 143-89-6 in 20 seasons at Iowa.  By the late 1990s his program had slipped and in 1998 Fry finished 3-8 in his final season.  In came Kirk Ferentz, now considered one of college football’s best coaches. His first two seasons he won four games and lost 19.  Later came two conference championships within three seasons.

Kansas is a basketball school, right?  Not so much anymore.  Historically, Kansas has sometimes been about as bad as Kansas State and coach Mark Mangino came into this season with these records: 2-10, 6-7, 4-7, 7-5 and 6-6.  Check out the Jayhawks now: 10-0, ranked in the top five in the country and possibly headed to the national championship game.

Even at talent overload and tradition-rich USC, things don’t always start out so hot.  In 2001, Pete Carroll’s first season, he lost four straight games, finished with a 6-6 record and had the embarrassment of losing to Utah in the Las Vegas Bowl.  Better days, to say the least, followed as the Trojans won national championships in 2003 and 2004.

What all these tales of success come down to is this: Brewster deserves patience and support while he goes about his business.  Don’t judge him today. Wait for the results of 2008 and 2009.