Golden Nugz for 4-21-09

This weekend marks the beginning of the upcoming football season in a couple ways.

First, ESPN will overhype the NFL Draft. There will be watch parties, incessant blog coverage, talk radio chatter and endless coversage. Out here in the DC area I tend to listen to ESPN980 a hybrid local-national sports talk radio station. Just last week they had an hour segment breaking down the Redskins' schedule. Wow.

For those of us who like the college game and are Minnesota fans, we'll get the first glimpse at the Golden Gophers as the team takes the field at St. Thomas University for its annual Spring Game. You can attend if you like for free. Kickoff is 1:30 p.m. on April 25 at O'Shaughnessy Stadium.

I obviously will not be attending, and I'm frankly not ready yet for the football season to be upon us. But I will be interested in seeing how the offense in general is operating. Have we done a complete 180 from the spread fo a Glen Mason-esque power game? Perhaps more importantly, does our offensive line look like a cohesive enough unit to be able to protect Adam Weber or provide holes for a ground game?

So, if you go, I'd love a report on the offense and the offensive line.

And, as a little teaser, I believe GN is working on a way-too-early preview of the football team's season opener against Syracuse.

• A number of Gophers made the All-Weekend Team list over at Big Ten Hardball. If you're a baseball fan and follow the Gophers, I encourage you to get on this team's bandwagon. We'll try to provide you access to coverage like this as well. Big Ten Hardball is a great resource if you haven't checked it out.
• Two more stories on Twittering Tim. Here's the Minnesota Daily taking a broad approach and looking at Brewster's use of new media. In this aritcle Brewster denies that he published the Tweet about "Fat Pat." There's been a lot of this going on, mysterious Tweets that show up and then vanish. And then we have Cedar Rapids Gazette blogger Mike Hlas writing "Gophers coach briefly uses twitter for evil, not good."
• I've been slightly out of the college sports news circle the last week or so, but this made me shake my head over what Rick Pitino has been dealing with.
• Non-Gophers related shout-out here. .... if you're a Twins fan like I am, do check out our friends over at Twinkie Town. They do a great job of covering all things Twins. And now that baseball season is heaeting up, I plan to spend some game nights over there following the Twins as I was too cheap this year to get the MLB package.