MEGAN DAVIS: Hello Gopher fans. It’s Megan Davis with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to the Gold Standard, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota sports.
Today I am going to be talking a lot about football, just kind of the state of the team post Rutgers game and post bye week. I think a lot was revealed about where the Gophers are right now, and it was a very interesting game for them.
Number one Ohio State next week in Ohio, in Columbus, and it will be the hardest game of their schedule. They had their bye week after the Cal game, which was definitely needed. Darius Taylor, injured star running back with a hamstring injury. We don’t have any updates on kind of where he’s at in the process of recovery.
P.J. Fleck said it’s not supposed to be a long-term injury. However, he is giving no updates on what the week to week is looking like. And so ideally Taylor would be back for the Ohio State game because after watching the Rutgers game, his presence is sorely missed, but we don’t know.
It is very clear that we need a run game. And they did not have it on Saturday. In the first quarter, they ran a total of nine yards. Fame, who is our third string. Taylor obviously takes the first place and he is out along with our other running back, A.J. Turner. Both of them got injured in the Cal game. Turner got injured halfway through the Cal game.
Taylor was injured from the previous game. Fame took over, he ran 83 yards. I thought that was gonna be a promising start. I thought maybe, you know what, maybe the running back class is a little bit deeper than previously expected.
Their offensive coordinator, Greg Harbaugh, said that we are putting the game in Drake Lindsey’s arms. He’s gonna have to get us this win and Drake Lindsay threw for 324 yards. He was the one who won them in the game. That second half was completely on him. We only rushed for 35 yards. He completed 31 of 41 passes. He had a giant 78 yard throw.
The other big problem that I kind of noticed is that the Gophers kept missing tackles. They weren’t able to bring the Rutgers receivers down. Koi Perich had a big bounce back after his Cal game. I think he ended the game with 12 tackles and so he was definitely a huge improvement.
Obviously Danny Collins is our new defensive coordinator. This is his first year he’s worked with a team as a safety coach for a while, but he got promoted, so a bigger responsibility. But because the Gophers cannot stop the Rutgers run game, I think that there’s much room for improvement.
Even though later in the game it looked a lot better. The Gophers defense got seven sacks, which is very impressive. They allowed their running back Antwan Raymond to have his career high of rushing 161 yards, and I think that that could have been really cut short if the Gophers had found a way to stop the run earlier for it to take all the way to halftime for them to adjust to the Rutgers offense.
The Gophers got incredibly lucky that Drake Lindsey was able to step up in that second half because to give up 14 points in the first half and then come back later. Impressive feat. Fantastic way to pull together. Once again, Fleck talked about this so much in the post-game conference where he was like, the Gophers coaching staff made all of the correct adjustments in the second half and that I could really applaud them for.
Most teams, you know, you get down by that much. Second half, it takes a lot to come back from a two-score game. However, since this is Rutgers and the Gophers have to go play Ohio State at Ohio next week, you cannot give up 14 points to Ohio State and the first half, it’s not gonna work. If they want to compete against Ohio State, they have to come out strong.
And they didn’t come out strong in the game. Ohio State has just been running over teams over and over and over again. But it looks like Ohio State is going to be back in that championship game. They don’t look like they have really any weakness in their game. Which is scary because the Gophers have to go play there next week.
Before I move on from football completely, I do just wanna talk about professional football. Carson Wentz is in at QB for the Vikings. The Vikings suffered a lot of injuries to their d-line and the team then I thought was going to be very strong going into the season, looks to be struggling a lot. And Carson Wentz may be an NFL veteran, but there’s a reason he’s at backup now, it’s looking a little concerning.
I was watching their Dublin game today and the Steelers, who have also been a little bit of a mess, were very easily able to contain them. Kevin O’Connell is still a fantastic coach. They almost won the game, but just not enough. But I just thought I’d thrown a little bit of Vikings.
Gopher volleyball is doing fantastic. They have had three, you know, minor injuries that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts, but they’re on their 12th straight win after sweeping Michigan State a couple days ago, they just finished up their sweep of Rutgers as well.
They’re currently ranked number 12. We’ll have to play Wisconsin soon and Wisconsin is ranked really high, and that’ll be a super fun challenge for the Gophers. But they’ve had nine sweeps in 12 wins this year. Freshman Jordan Taylor hit a new career high with seven kills.
We did a story about her in the summer, so it’s good to see that she’s already, for being a freshman, has already acclimated to the high standard that the Gophers have set. Stella Swenson set a career high with four aces, along with 28 assists and six digs. Georgia Lee tallied career high four aces, and it was also their alumni day.
They honored 30 Golden Gophers for that Rutgers game, and what a great way for the alumni to see the current Gophers. It is now their 12th straight match since dropping their opener against Texas A&M, and this is continuing their longest win streak since 2019. Now that they’re in Big Ten play, obviously more challenging opponents. The Gophers have to play Nebraska. They do have the opportunity to play them at home, which is a plus.
Gopher soccer, despite their really strong start to the season, starting with the Big Ten opponents has been a little bit of a challenge. They’re 1-3-1 against Big Ten opponents, and they recently just lost to Michigan. They were on the road, which you know, makes it a little bit more difficult. But the soccer team has also faced injuries before.
The Lynx will no longer get to continue their playoff run. They were defeated by the Mercury. They’ve reached the end of their season, which is very sad considering their finals run that they made it to last year and everything during this season. It looked like it was going to be a repeat year for them that they would be able to make it back.
On Sunday with the injuries to Napheesa Collier and Cheryl Reeve having a one game suspension. They had an 11 point lead after the first quarter and a 13 point lead after the third quarter, but they fell apart in the fourth quarter in their game, two and three losses, which was very not normal for them because they led the league in fourth quarter net rating throughout the season.
And I think it is really just an impact of Collier not being there and then also not having Reeve there. Just such an odd situation to be in when you’re this far into the playoffs and when your chance to be in the finals is at stake.
If you didn’t know Reeve was serving a one game suspension because of an outburst during the end of game three where she was looking for a foul, a foul was not called. And it’s kind of just led to this bigger conversation about the playoffs in the WNBA gets so much more aggressive and the physicality gets ramped up by like a thousand and the refs just kinda let it happen and it’s leading to injuries and Reeve, she had enough.
So she kind of went after the ref. And then I think another reason why she got the suspension was because she also said something to some Phoenix fans on her way out. And, you know, as much as I believe that she’s probably in the right with that a foul should have been called.
The WNBA refs need to kind of step it up in terms of allowing this physicality. Because it’s getting players injured. If the league had to do something, they couldn’t just kinda let this slide because then what would it mean for other coaches? But it’s just kind of a really sad time for the Lynx because, you know, things are changing, the league is expanding. You only get so many chances to make a finals run with your roster.
And especially because they do have some women who are just getting older and getting towards the end of their careers. This isn’t a team of rookies. And so one thing I saw was on Kayla McBride, which she had a fantastic game. It’s hard, especially when you lay everything out there and where are the Lynx are gonna be a year from now.
They still have a great team, but it’s so difficult to keep reappearing when the league is changing so much. This looked like it would be their year. All of the women know each other more. They know exactly where to be for each other. So the Mercury are now going to the finals.
Another thing about the Lynx is that this also hurts, I feel like even more, because Napheesa Collier was robbed of that MVP trophy. I love A’ja Wilson, but you know, everything kind of pointed to her and then to it to go to Wilson seemed like such a, like how did this happen situation. Just another, just another nail in the coffin.
Unfortunately, Minnesota also is the first team in WNBA history to lose two playoff games when leading by at least 14 points. They held onto that number one spot in the west for until the season ended. And so what an unfortunate way to go out in a close game without your star and without your coach, and we’ll see how they address these issues in the off season.
This episode was by Megan Davis and produced by Ceci Heinen and Atticus Marse. As always, we appreciate you listening in and feel free to send us a message to our email inbox at [email protected] with any questions, comments or concerns.
I’m Megan Davis, and this has been the Gold Standard.
