Golden Nugz - 07.19.2010

I know that many residents of Gopher Nation are not all that happy with the current Athletic Director, but according to Sid there are talks about a contract extension for Mr. Maturi.

Bruininks is thinking that his successor shouldn't be saddled with hiring a new athletic director when he comes in. Also, Bruininks is very fond of Maturi and believes he is good for the university.

Football and basketball have not seen a whole lot of success under Maturi.  But to his credit he did oversee the building of TCF Bank Stadium, the non-revenue sports have flourished and the athletic department has been financially stable in a tough economic climate.  I don't have a strong opinion on Maturi either way but assuming he'd accept, be ready for at least 2 more years after his current contract is up.

• College Gridiron has a Gopher preview up and they are not very kind to the Golden Gophers.
  

  Best case this team is 6-6. Worst case they are 1-11. I have no idea where the wins are going to come from. Most likely Minnesota is going 0-8 in the Big 10. The Purdue game is the Boilermakers homecoming affair. Illinois could be ripe, but it's a road game too and Illinois should be able to run over Minnesota's defense. HC Tim Brewster has to weather this storm to some degree. Minnesota could potentially have 7 starter returning on offense & 9 starters returning on defense in 2011, which could set up for a very nice season for the Gophers.

  I won't be able to handle another 1-11 season, I really hope all pundits are proved wrong this year.
  
• I like this take on Big Ten realignment.  The premise is that competitive balance changes over time, geography does not.  Putting the easternmost school in the western division is weird.  As a Gopher fan I really do not care who is in our division or how this all shakes out.  We have to get better if we want to compete in a BX championship game anyway.  I do believe that Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin can be just as competitive as Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State.  I do not think that is a wildly unbalanced.  Really Ohio State is in a class by itself right now, but the rest of those five schools are all in the same ballpark. 
  
• Ohio State at Minnesota is one of Rittenberg's Big Ten trap games this fall.  I'm not sure I agree.  If the Buckeye's have a bye week following our game, I'm not sure you can define that as a trap game.  If they can't focus on us with nobody to focus on the week after then they'll have bigger problems this year.
• Meet one of the incoming freshmen on the Gopher women's basketball team.