MEGAN DAVIS: Hello Gopher fans, it’s Megan Davis.
ATTICUS MARSE: And Atticus Marse.
DAVIS: With the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to the Gold Standard, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota sports.
MARSE: As we usually do, let’s lead with football. They played Oregon on Friday, which was the second Friday game this year. Kind of weird.
DAVIS: Darius Taylor was back. This isn’t the NFL, where it’s like recovery time. It’s like, you kind of have to play if you wanna get drafted. But he had a good game. But yeah, so that was impressive. For a guy who’s been struggling with injury kind of the entire season it seems like. They still got, I mean, Oregon had 300 more yards of offense than they did. Was it competitive?
MARSE: No.
DAVIS: No.
MARSE: Across the board, like the Gophers didn’t, there weren’t any terrible mistakes made. It was just like a clinical dismantling it kind of felt like.
DAVIS: I was reading the Oregon student newspaper. And they called it “A demolition job,” so.
MARSE: I think that would be an accurate way to describe it.
DAVIS: Yeah, I think so too. Their quarterback broke an Oregon single game record, he completed 90% of his passes.
MARSE: That also goes, we talked about this a little bit last week, injuries in the secondary causing a lot of problems. I mean the Gophers just getting dunked on through the air. That’s a factor, but still like 300 on your head.
DAVIS: That’s crazy. No, we did talk about this I feel like a lot last time where we just, like the Oregon offense is just kind of more competitive than the Gophers in every single way. And so it was gonna be an uphill battle. Regan wrote a story about it.
They haven’t played Oregon a lot because they’re new to the Big Ten. They’re just a much more competitive team right now, and the Gophers have been suffering injuries and they’re away from home and we still have Drake Lindsey as a quarterback. Not a bad thing, but like obviously he’s still developing. I don’t know. The Ducks have gotten really good with their quarterbacks.
The past three have been, OK, actually, I don’t really think Bo Nix is that great of a quarterback, but.
MARSE: But he’s in the league.
DAVIS: But he is in the league.
MARSE: And he was a great college quarterback.
DAVIS: And that’s impressive to be in the league. But like past three quarterbacks, so far so good. But that was Gophers football, and then they go play Northwestern at Wrigley Field.
MARSE: Fun location, by the way. Wrigley?
DAVIS: Fun location. Because Northwestern was at their weird field for a while, right by the lake. And then they’re building a new one and I guess this is just the fun game they’re doing. I haven’t actually looked too much into it. I don’t know. It’s just a fun new location. Adds some intrigue.
MARSE: Most years I feel like Northwestern is kind of a team that’s to be somewhat scoffed at going into these games, but they’re not bad this year at all in the slightest. So this is going to probably be a pretty close, pretty hard fought, intense game.
DAVIS: Yeah. And if the Wildcats win, they could get, they could be bowl eligible.
MARSE: Going into wrestling, Minnesota finished fifth at the National Duals Invitational, which is a pretty big deal. This is one of the first big dual tournaments, or really just events in general that Minnesota wrestles at during the season.
National Duals is a big dual meet that brings together a bunch of different teams and they have several dual meets in a single set of days. Basically what a dual meet is, is when you have two teams and each wrestler from each weight class wrestles the person from the other team and they see who can get the most points.
I’m just gonna explain this because I feel like a lot of people wouldn’t know. Three points for a decision, four points for a major decision, five for a tech fall and then six for a pin. And then you add all of those points up at the end and then you see which team had more points, and then they win the dual.
So national duals does that with some of the biggest college teams. So Minnesota started off against Virginia Tech, who was ranked 11, and the Gophers were ranked 10. They won there and then they had to face off against Ohio State, which is for those of you who don’t know, one of the holy land wrestling schools that is gonna win all the time.And they lost 29-6.
And then they got sent down to the bottom half of the bracket to face off against Northern Iowa. Which they handled, and then they beat Missouri as well, and then ended up winning again against Virginia Tech to come all the way back and get fifth place. So the loss against Ohio State was tough with seeding, but then they came back and really had some good wins along the way.
Some highlights are Jore Volk, who is ranked number eight, beating number four Eddie Ventresca with a 4-2 win. He’s a Virginia Tech Hokie. But overall it was a really solid showing from this Gophers team, and they’re gonna be in action November 25 at Williams, like I talked about before, against South Dakota State. So strong start for the season for the Gophers.
DAVIS: Minnesota women’s basketball, we kind of talked about this a little bit last time. They’ll have their first real competitor on Tuesday against the University of Kansas. Recently, they beat the NJIT Highlanders or the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 88-39, which is another insane score.
But once again, they have a very kinda weak schedule until they can hop into Big Ten play. The production is a lot better than I think it was last year. This time it was Brylee Glenn who led the team in scoring. She was a transfer pickup in the off season from Kansas State. The Gophers won’t have her for long because she’s a graduate student.
But yeah, the production coming from the entire team right now is something we didn’t really see as much last year. And now it seems like scoring is coming from everywhere. Multiple players are hitting at least 10 points. And then against NJIT there were 45 points from the bench. Also, Amaya Battle hit 500 assists and a thousand points.
She now joins five other Gophers who have hit the same benchmark. If Battle stays healthy I think she could really pass Debbie Hunter, who was fourth on the list, and I think only has a hundred more in each category. And if you’re unfamiliar with Hunter, she was on the team from 79-83.
MARSE: Men’s basketball beat the Green Bay Phoenix in overtime, but they beat them 72-65, which looks like a regular time scoreline, but it was overtime. The big storyline in this game is the Golden Gophers shot 51% from the free throw line.
And Robert Vaihola was 2-9 from the free throw line. It was a very back and forth evenly matched game and the Gophers just really didn’t capitalize on their opportunities at the line and then also just inside. And at the last minute, Chancey Willis Jr. actually had a half court supposed game winner.
But you could tell that he knew it was a little bit after the buzzer and it was a little bit late, and then it sent it to O.T.. But the Gophers did nail it down in overtime. Medved is going to have them shooting free throws for days. They’re probably in there right now, just putting them up all night.
DAVIS: Looking at what Green Bay has done so far, I don’t think it’s terrible, but not something you kind of really wanted to see. But I, they’re able to pull through. This team clearly wants to be competitive and clearly is trying to be competitive as much as they can.
Even though Jaylen Crocker-Johnson could not hit a shot in that Green Bay game, he still did get another double-double. Medved was talking about like, since he’s worked with Crocker-Johnson for so long he kinda knows who he is as a player. Someone asked a question of like, what do you do when a guy’s like shots just aren’t hitting?
And he was like, I’m not gonna tell him to keep shooting through it. Because sometimes that doesn’t work. But he kept his trust in Crocker-Johnson, and it’s not his best game ever. But he did what he needed to do and the Gophers came away with the win.
Pretty simple for women’s hockey. They played Bemidji State and swept them, classic. One of the games was 6-2 and 9-2. They recorded 50 plus shots on goal. They recorded 50 plus shots on goal for the second straight game. They’re 9-2 win and they finished with 63 shots on goal, which is. And they limited Bemidji State to just 10. Go watch women’s hockey because that’s insane.
MARSE: That’s like absurd. The puck’s barely getting over to the other side of the ice at that point.
DAVIS: I don’t think it did really. Their hard stretch is over, which we kind of talked about last time. So Josefin Bouveng, she extended her point streak to 13 straight games. What else is there to say besides like, wow, everything they’re doing is impressive right now. Men’s hockey, not so much.
MARSE: Yeah. First, game men’s hockey game against Long Island they lose 6-2. I just wanna say as a precursor to that is that was one of the emptier men’s hockey student sections I’ve seen. And even then I think it’s a little bit bigger than I was even expecting going into that game.
And by the time the third period came around, it was a bit of an empty arena there. That was not, not really how they wanted to start that series. And I got, I will say Long Island is not that bad of a hockey team.
They only lost to number two Boston College by one point at the start of the year, so it’s not like there are some scrubs going on out there. Even though their school isn’t super recognizable across other sports and academia they’re not a terrible ice hockey team. And then in the second game, they did bounce back, picked up a win 6-3. Luca Di Pasquo was actually named the big star of the week for the week before.
DAVIS: I was gonna say.
MARSE: For last week when he stopped 52 of 53 shots he faced against Notre Dame. So there’s a positive coming from last week’s series. Next they are playing Penn State here and they’re doing a whiteout.
So it’s taking the Penn State whiteout and they’re turning the tables on them. That game’s gonna be on FS1 too, a nationally televised game. And that’ll be a really good game to be at. Fun vibes, win or lose, good atmosphere.
DAVIS: It’s just not a good look for the Gophers to lose against a team that’s not ranked. And very new to the league, even if they are doing good.
So volleyball, it was a little bit of a struggle because they lost against number one Nebraska. So that wasn’t like the most ideal situation. But Nebraska is also number one.
Very exciting news. They swept number 24, Penn State. They’ve struggled against ranked opponents a lot this year. But it’s good to kind of like get another one.
And then they outlasted Iowa in five sets. Iowa isn’t ranked. The games were kind of pretty close back to back. They took away the win and they are 88 and 11 against Iowa of all time, winning 50 straight games against them. They haven’t lost against Iowa since 1995. That sucks for Iowa.
MARSE: You know where we’re about to head now. The pro sports corner. Your Minnesota Vikings lost to the Chicago Bears 19-17 in another, frankly, somewhat ugly J.J. McCarthy performance.
DAVIS: You don’t have to say somewhat.
MARSE: It was ugly.
DAVIS: It was ugly.
MARSE: 16-32, 150 yards, a touchdown and two picks. Just never, never looked comfortable out there. Aaron Jones actually rushed okay, 16 carries 70 yards, four-and-a-half average. Questions were asked coming into the season, and if you don’t perform during the season, those questions are gonna keep being asked.
And I think those questions aren’t being asked as much towards McCarthy himself, but also towards the organization as a whole for how they’ve handled their quarterback situation in the past two or three years.
DAVIS: J.J. McCarthy, out of everyone in that draft, I don’t know why they kind of abandoned all of their backup options.
MARSE: A team that’s not failing, that’s doing pretty solid right now.
DAVIS: Timberwolves.
MARSE: Timberwolves. 8-5, seventh in the west, just playing pretty solid to start the year off. Anthony Edwards is playing again. Jaden McDaniels has been super good to start the year.
Minnesota Wild tonight, the 16, beat the Golden Knights in overtime to go to 9-7-4, which leaves them in sixth in the central division. The central division is actually pretty damn good. If they were in the pacific, they’d be forth, so they’re not doing too bad.
DAVIS: This episode is by Megan Davis.
MARSE: And Atticus Marse.
DAVIS: And produced by Ceci Heinen.
MARSE: And Atticus Marse.
DAVIS: As always, we appreciate you listening in, and feel free to send a message to our email inbox at [email protected] with any questions, comments or concerns. I’m Megan Davis.
MARSE: And I’m Atticus Marse.
DAVIS: And this has been the Gold Standard.
