We all know that Florida is the mythical National Champion of the college football world. And we all know that there is a long list of schools who belive they should be national champs. I think I want to throw our hat into the ring and claim that Minnesota has a legit argument to be national champs. I know that we didn't exactly play in a BCS game but the table below clearly lays out how we are clearly better than Florida.
| Minnesota | beat | Illinois | on | 10/11/2008 | by a score of | 27-20 (on the road!) |
| Illinois | beat | Iowa | on | 11/01/2008 | by a score of | 27-24 |
| Iowa | beat | South Carolina | on | 01/01/2009 | by a score of | 31-10 (on the road!) |
| South Carolina | beat | Mississippi | on | 10/04/2008 | by a score of | 31-24 (on the road!) |
| Mississippi | beat | Florida | on | 09/27/2008 | by a score of | 31-30 (on the road!) |
| Florida | is the 2009 Div 1-A champion | |||||
It is simple math people. MN > Ill > Iowa > S Car > Miss > Florida = MN is the best team in college football. Although I guess there are 115 schools (out of 120) who have some transitive chain to a nation championship, so we aren't exactly in any elite company.
- Join the Daily Gopher on Facebook. I have set up this page, click on it an join us there. I'm not sure what we will do with it yet, but I'm sure it will be far beyond your wildest dreams.
- Some good people over at Mercer University have developed a model to predict where football prospects will eventually decide to enroll. I could totally explain it to you but I'll let the authors do the talking...
The model was built on a database capturing characteristics and decisions of 3,395 recruited athletes for the three "recruiting seasons" between 2002 and 2004. On average, each player was choosing from among a group of 4 schools. A wide array of player and team level data were gathered for this task. Then, a special form of a probit model was developed to capture, to the best extent possible a statistical equation to capture the decision making process.
Overall they are predicting at a 75% accuracy rate, which is pretty good considering the flakiness of these 18 year old kids. They were incorrect on the decision of Bryce McNeal and they give the Gophers a 12% chance at Ronnie Wingo. (HT to Black Shoe Diaries)
- We have had the fortune of watching Charissa Thompson as the sideline reporter for many Gopher games this year (FB and BB). The U of Wis got the chance to do 20 questions with Miss Thompson. If you don't feel like reading it I'll give you a synopsis...country, The Alchemist, sky dive, yoga, hip-hop, El Cholo, Aruba, coffee, Seattle and sushi. We will do our best to secure an interview with Charissa and we'll get to the core of who she is and what makes her tick.
- Sticking with the sports reporter theme, KSTP's Ryan Kibbe is making a strange and maybe unprecidented move from the sports desk to the pulpit. Kibbe is moving to Green Bay to work for a church and is giving up the life of covering sports. He wasn't exactly a huge name in the local sports media, but it is an interesting move to say the least.
- This is post-Wisconsin win and pre-Northwestern debacle, but the Chicago Tribune wrote a little something on the Gophers.
