The Gopher football program begins its 126^th 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 10^th 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.

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Gopher fans might have thought they had seen the last of dome stadiums when Minnesota played its final game in the Metrodome but not so.  The Gophers open their schedule on Saturday in Syracuse’s Carrier Dome, named for the air conditioning company.  Interestingly, the Carrier Dome isn’t air conditioned.

Tony Dungy, the former Gopher quarterback and assistant coach who won the 2007 Super Bowl as head coach of Indianapolis, has taped a message to be shown on the video board for the opening game at TCF Bank Stadium on September 12.

Sports Illustrated pro football writer Peter King is picking the Bears, not the Vikings, to win the NFC North.

Former Vikings assistant coach Dean Dalton will host Tim Brewster’s weekly TV show that is starting this week on Fox Sports North and the Big Ten Network.  Dalton and Brewster are friends.

Last week Dalton was inducted into the Burlington High School Athletic Hall of Fame in Burlington, Wisconsin.  Dalton said he won nine letters in high school including football where he made all-state before attending the Air Force Academy.  His father Don was the athletic director and football coach at Burlington.  The two are the only father-son combo in the school’s hall of fame, Dalton said.  He also said Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo attended the high school and was inducted into the hall of fame last year.

An NHL source told Sports Headliners Marian Gaborik will have three major adjustments going from the Wild to the New York Rangers.  The high profile Gaborik must deal with the abundant and aggressive New York media.  The source rates the star forward a 3.5 on a scale of five for his media relations.  Second, the Madison Square Garden ice sheet is far from the NHL’s best because of the arena’s busy schedule. Third, the Rangers’ practice facility is about an hour from Manhattan, not exactly like zipping from Gaborik’s downtown Minneapolis residence to Parade Ice Gardens.

Wild single-game tickets go on sale beginning at 9 a.m. on Saturday, September 12 at the Xcel Energy Center box office and 10 a.m. at all other Ticketmaster locations. The Wild have sold out every regular season and Stanley Cup home game in club history – 341 consecutive games over nine years.

In two years the Timberwolves roster could include Spanish guard Ricky Rubio and Cole Aldrich, the Bloomington Jefferson grad now at Kansas.  The Wolves need a center and might be positioned in next year’s draft to take Aldrich who is likely to skip his senior year.  Rubio, a 20-year-old in two years, will probably be ready to leave home in 2011.

Here’s more evidence of how the Twins have struggled to piece together a starting rotation this season.  On Tuesday night Jeff Manship became the fourth Twins pitcher to make his first career start in 2009, joining Anthony Swarzak, Brian Duensing and Armando Gabino.

Duensing, who gave up no runs during seven innings in yesterday’s 4-2 Twins loss to Chicago, has an ERA of 1.42 in his last three starts.

The Twins Justin Morneau has four hits in his last 34 at-bats and has slipped to third for most RBI’s in the American League.

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The Twins’ surge, winning five of their last six games, has moved them up in the Central Division standings.  They are one half game behind second place Chicago and 4.5 games back of first place Detroit.

The remaining 2009 schedule, starting tonight at home against Texas, has the Twins playing 18 games in Minneapolis and 17 on the road.  The Twins are seven games over .500 at home so far and eight games under on the road.

The teams remaining on the schedule, in addition to Texas, are Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Kansas City, all home and away, plus Oakland at home and on the road at Toronto.  Only two of those teams, the Rangers and Tigers, are playing over .500 baseball.  Cleveland, Kansas City, Oakland and Toronto are a combined 66 games under .500.

All of this reminds us of a sports truism: it’s not just how good your team is, it’s also about the ability of the opposition and how that team is playing right now.  The Twins won five of their last six against two of the worst teams in the American League, Kansas City and Baltimore.

While Texas is 71-55, Chicago and Detroit also have challenging weekend assignments.  The White Sox are at New York (79-48) and Detroit is home against Tampa Bay (69-57).  The Tigers have to play Tampa Bay again in September while the White Sox’s schedule includes Los Angeles (75-51).

To their credit, the Twins have been receiving improved performances from players like outfielder Delmon Young, second baseman Alexi Casilla and pitcher Scott Baker during their surge.  Those are contributions that haven’t always been there this season when the Twins wanted to roll with a win streak like the five gamer that ended with a loss to Baltimore Wednesday night.

More contributors, assisting the team’s core players, have enabled this group to not only win more as of late, but sometimes rally in games when needed.  That says something about the team’s leadership which includes manager Ron Gardenhire, pitching coach Rick Anderson, relief pitcher Joe Nathan, catcher Joe Mauer, first baseman Justin Morneau and outfielder Michael Cuddyer.  There’s no panic or give up in their DNA.

The Twins have winning records against division rivals Chicago (7-5) and Detroit (7-4).  Also, in their last 10 games neither the White Sox (4-6) nor Tigers (5-5) have been delighting observers with their performances.

If there was no divisional play in the American League, the Twins would be 16 games behind league-leading New York in the loss column and watching from far behind as the season moves toward an early October close.  Whoever created the idea of splitting the league into three divisions and creating more competition is smiling today.  Twins fans can be happy knowing the team is playing better and facing mediocre opposition between now and season’s end.

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