TDG's Happy Thanksgiving Open Thread

This has become a bit of a tradition here at TDG.  Annually we take this time to be thankful.  Many of us are thankful for families, health, jobs, faith and other relatively important things of that nature.  But it is also important to be thankful for the truly important things.  I'll start and then of course it is up to you to tell us what you are thankful for.

Things I am thankful for...

• The TDG Community - sincerely, this place has become a lot of fun and rather lively over the past couple years.  If you look at straight traffic, we rank in the bottom half of the other Big Ten SBN blogs.  But when you look at our total comments and comment per visit, we shoot to #2 in the conference with a decent gap between us and third.  This is a testament to you guys who come here and use this as a forum to passionately talk about Gopher sports.  Just writing articles and nobody commenting is a failed article.  Getting 10 comments used to be the gold standard amongst the writing staff here.  Now we don't really have a threshold that will prevent you from being made fun of, but we routinely hit 100+ comments on even the most boring posts.  I really am thankful for those who come here and passionately discuss Gopher sports with us.
• Norwood Teague - Everything I have seen from Teague demonstrates to me that he gets what it takes to build a strong athletic department that will support and cultivate very good teams.  He may not be perfect, but everything from marketing to facilities planning to handling of coaches and handling difficult situations shows me that he knows what he is doing.  I believe the athletic department is in good hands.  There are a few key decisions that will need time before we will know if they were the "right" decisions, but I think he was of the right mindset when he made them and did them with the right intentions.
• Jerry Kill - How could I not have lead with this one right?  Just about everything is coming up roses for Kill in #year3 and this guys could run for mayor right now.  I mentioned this before but I love how much he has created a culture of family and accountability and how he shows genuine interest in producing quality young men who will be well-prepared for life after college football.  I believe that he is a great man and I desperately hope he goes on to show that he is a great coach.
• The TDG Staff - this is a fun group of guys to interact with and write with.  We have some fun, usually over e-mail, and they are really fun to do this blog thingy with.  But the fact that we all share a passion for Gopher sports, we've all come to that passion from different places and we express it in different ways; makes this a unique and fun group.  Good guys.  Collectively and individually they have all made significant contributions to building TDG what it is today.