If you'd rather watch a video version of this post, check out @JustWinMN on TikTok or Instagram to see my post yesterday with my thoughts on where the Gophers are at as a football program.
With their win over New Mexico in the Rate bowl, the Gophers finished the season 8-5, which included a 7-0 home record and an 0-5 road record. It was yet another "good, not great" season that we've come to expect under PJ Fleck.
There's no doubt that PJ Fleck has raised the floor of the Gopher program. This is the 5th season under Fleck in which the Gophers finished with 8 wins or more. He's 7-0 in bowl games, 6-1 against unofficial rival Nebraska, 5-4 against Wisconsin but just 1-8 against Iowa.
I have been going to Gopher games since my mom and dad got season tickets when I was in 8th grade, which was the 2007 season. Since then I have considered Gopher Football to be my favorite Minnesota team, and my fandom has only increased since Fleck became coach.
I have seen this program in the pit of misery. In 2007 the Gophers went 1-11 and had what felt like the worst defense in the history of organized football. In 2010 I watched in-person as they lost to FCS South Dakota at TCF Bank Stadium. So seeing Fleck raise the floor to where making the Quick Lane Bowl (the Detroit bowl which has a new name I don't feel like looking up) feels like a bad year for the Gophers is nothing I will ever take for granted.
But I do think it's fair for fans to wonder when or if we'll ever see a 2019-like season again. It feels like this program has been stuck in neutral since the 2020 COVID season. A lot of solid seasons with 8 or 9 wins, but seasons where you could point to a couple of losses and think "we should have won that game." Seasons where we were one painful loss away from the season turning from solid to special.
And although we won 8 games this year, a 10 or 11 win season still feels far away. We go to Ohio State and Oregon and look like we don't deserve to be on the same field as them. We go down to Iowa and the game is over before you can blink. We make a Northwestern offense that's offense ranked towards the bottom of college football look like the greatest show on turf. Yes, if we beat Cal and Northwestern, both games we should have won, we finish with 10 wins. But we've grown accustom to dropping a few games like that each year.
So if next year is another one of those years where we finish with an 8-5 type record, with a couple solid wins but a couple bad losses, I wouldn't blame fans one bit for starting to feel impatient. And I do think PJ is a good coach and the right guy for the job. His recruiting has been on fire of late and the program is in as good of shape as it's been for awhile. But it's not unreasonable for fans to expect this program to, every 4 or 5 years, make a jump and be in the mix with the top teams of the Big Ten. Finish with 10+ wins and go to a top-tier bowl game. And in the past 5 seasons, it's felt at times like we've had teams capable of getting to that level but for some reason we just don't quite get to that level.
I love what the future of this program looks like. With guys like Drake Lindsey and Anthony Smith coming back, a couple solid recruiting classes coming in, we should have some real opportunities to get back to the 2019 level. We just need to break through and actually do it.
As for the 2025 season? I'd rate it a 5/10. A couple nice wins over Nebraska and Wisconsin. But a couple games against Purdue and Northwestern where are defense looked lost, and a couple games where we looked like a freshman team playing a Varsity team.
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