Golden Nugz 10.17.11 - Taking a Break From Gopher Football

This is going to be a Gopher Football free Nugz today.  And this is out of the ordinary but I'm going to lead with Gopher Baseball.

College Baseball Daily has a 2 part interview with Gopher coach John Anderson.  I follow CBD in my reader and they do a great job covering college baseball and usually that means they spend just a little bit of time on the Big Ten.  But this is a great interview.  Part 1 deals mostly with the current Gopher roster looking ahead to the season.  Part 2 is more focuses on where the Big Ten fits into the overall college baseball landscape.

Yeah, we’re coming off of a very unusual season last year. I think I’ll describe it as the season that never was. The collapse of the dome and playing only 14 home games and the challenges with travel. We had a lot of weather issues. It seemed like we spent a lot of time sitting around trying to figure out when we were going to play, if we were going to play, regardless of where we were. We also had travel issues with different problems. Just the schedule alone was daunting but then you face the other challenges, it was a difficult year. But it’s in the past and we’re going to put it behind us. It was very unusual. We knew we had a great group coming back after a solid run in ’10 into the NCAA tournament, winning both the regular season and Big Ten [tournament] and I think the dome collapse really changed our season in a lot of different ways.

Both parts of the interview are great and absolutely worth readin.

• Gopher Hockey had an outstanding weekend sweeping UMD on the road.  Jeffrick summarized Friday's thrilling overtime win and SBN MInnesota recapped Saturday.
• 1500 ESPN also recapped the weekend sweep with this to say
  

  While celebrating last season's NCAA title, UMD is wearing throwback sweaters at home all season. And for this weekend, it was a throwback to the days where the Gopher hockey team dominated their northern neighbors nearly every time they played. 

• Freshman Kyle Rau, last year's Mr. Hockey is having a great start to his collegiate career. Four goals in four games is an impressive start.
• KFAN sat down with Ralph Sampson III on media day.
• Myron gives us five things that the hoops team must to do win NOW.
• Jared Sullinger is interviewed here and there are two very interesting Gopher related nuggets.  Apparently his most challenging Big Ten defender was Colten Iverson, who is no longer in the Big Ten.  And if he wasn't playing for Thad Motta he would most like to play for Tubby Smith.
• Finally, don't call it a comeback but Tubby Smith is coming out fighting this year. 
  

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