Among coach Tim Brewster’s repeated mantras has been “building a championship defense.” Halfway through Brewster’s fourth season that hasn’t been heard for awhile and for good reason.
Taking “Gopher Nation” to the Rose Bowl following a Big Ten championship has been the Brewster goal since becoming coach in January of 2007. That success was to be built on a championship defense but the 2010 Gophers are…um…struggling.
Minnesota is last in conference scoring defense at 32.3 points per game. Also last among the league’s 11 teams in rushing defense yielding 196.3 yards a game. In total yards Minnesota is giving up 417.8 yards per game, the second most in the conference.
Those stats are troublesome and so, too, is that the defense’s stated goal and No. 1 priority is stopping the run. Through six games, neither the linemen, linebackers nor defensive backs have impressed as the Gophers, with a 1-5 record, have lost five consecutive games including a 41-38 loss to South Dakota.
During Brewster’s first season in 2007 the Gophers gave up 440 points, second most in school history. That was an average of 36.7 points per game in the 1-11 season.
By now more was expected of the coaching staff and players. The defense and overall limited success is more similar to coach Jim Wacker’s program, than Glen Mason’s, the coach Brewster replaced.
Wacker, who coached the Gophers from 1992-96, had a 3-8 record in his fourth season and his team gave up 33.5 points per game. Mason inherited a mess from Wacker but by his third season was 8-4, including 5-3 in the Big Ten and his team allowed 16.3 points a game.
Mason, who coached Minnesota from 1997-2006, took the Gophers to seven second level bowl games. His mantra from day one on the job was “stop the run first” and sometimes his teams did. He was dismissed because his career Big Ten record was 16 games below .500.
Mason’s last team had a 6-7 record and gave up 26 points per game. He left a “cupboard” with more resources than Wacker put in place for him. But so far Brewster’s record is more Wacker-like than similar to Mason. Brewster is 6-20 in conference games and 15-29 overall. Wacker’s numbers through the same number of games: 7-19 and 12-32.