Tonight is Game 7 of the World Series and why not publish an article on Gopher baseball’s 2020 schedule on the same day. Gopher baseball is perennially one of the best programs in the Big Ten and often nationally relevant. Because of their level of competitiveness they typically play a rather challenging schedule.

This week, the program released their 2020 schedule and it is indeed challenging.

It gets started on Valentine’s Day, a Friday this year, as they are taking part in the Angels College Classic in Tempe, Arizona. As part of this collection of collegiate teams the Gophers will face the following teams over the 4-day tournament.

• Oregon
• Pepperdine
• Illinois
• San Diego

The following weekend the Gophers will host TCU at US Bank Stadium for a 3-game set.

Those first 7 games should all be challenging games against good competition.

Continuing on after the TCU series the Gophers will also face a collection of ACC programs in the state of North Carolina when they play UNC, Duke and NC State in consecutive days Feb 28, 29 and Mar 1st.

Then there will be 4 series played before the Gophers hit the Big Ten portion of the schedule.

• Utah (H)
• Creighton (H)
• Air Force (A)
• Texas Tech (A)

As per usual there will be midweek games sprinkled into the schedule against regional D1 programs like South Dakota St, North Dakota St, Milwaukee and Oral Roberts.

At this point it is hard to gauge which programs are going to be higher caliber and really boost the team’s strength of schedule or NCAA Tournament resume. But Texas Tech won the Big 12 last year and made the College World Series. TCU was 5th in the Big 12 but perennially a nationally relevant program. Creighton won the Big East, UNC finished 3rd in the very tough ACC, NC State was 4th.

So you can see that there are a number of good programs awaiting the Gophers in February and March.

Then for Big Ten play, it is mostly important to take note of who they will NOT be playing this year. With an unbalanced schedule the Gophers will play 8 Big Ten opponents. This year they are missing Indiana and Nebraska, who finished 2nd and 3rd respectively in the 2019 Big Ten. They are also not going to face Ohio State and Penn State.

The other potentially contending team, one who was the NCAA College World Series Runner-up, is Michigan. And the Gophers will be hosting Michigan this year on the weekend of May 8th. Potentially Big Ten regular season title implications on this weekend.

ACTUAL SCHEDULE HERE

Whether or not Minnesota will be a contending team, we will cover that at a later date. A MUCH later date. But this looks to be very nice non-conference schedule and a Big Ten schedule that really is in their favor.

Gopher baseball games are absolutely fantastic. It is a great way to get close to the game and take your kids to a rather inexpensive event.