Two perspectives on the same win

The one thing Steve and I share in common is our affiliation with Purdue University. Other than that, our respective teams don’t line up at all with each others. Twins-White Sox. Colts-49ers. Wild-“What the hell is hockey”. And so on. Well, anyways, we both naturally caught the Purdue – Minnesota game last night. I was sitting in the Minnesota student section while Steve was sitting comfortably on a couch in Indianapolis. Lo and behold, we BOTH have notes from the game. First mine, then Steve’s.

Before I left for the game, I made a stop at church, mostly to atone for my sins, just in case I was beat to death in my Purdue gear at the Metrodome. Naturally, a couple all in their Minnesota paraphernalia sat right next to me, and I could hear them whispering under their breath the entire time. During the Lord’s Prayer and the subsequent handshakes, they looked dismayed having to touch me. This would be a fun night.
The first thing I noticed was how ridiculous the Minnesota gold looks. It’s yellow, friends. And putting that yellow on their pants made their legs look as though they were made out of candy corn. It’s not intimidating.
Speaking of not intimidating, the Gophers defense may be one of the worst units I’ve ever seen in person. The defensive line is atrocious and the linebacking corps is depressing. The secondary is merely bad. Amir Pinnix at running back is still a decent talent, that didn’t change, and if the Gophers are willing to let him carry the load for a while, they might be able to stay competitive against the Northwesterns of the world, but gracious, that is a terrible defense. I would like to say that it has a lot to do with how good Curtis Painter and Dorien Bryant are, but really, it has more to do with the complete lack of team speed.
Just a microcosm of the incompetence of the Gophers. After Cliff Avril scored a touchdown on his interception return, two cheerleaders were dropped, which was quickly followed by Goldy the Gopher’s t-shirt launcher losing pressure, and he had to start chucking them into the bleachers (Goldy had the best arm on the Gopher’s squad). The Gophers are completely ill equipped to having a team.
Oh, yeah, by the way that blocked field goal was the funniest play I’ve ever seen. You only get the end of the play in the video here, but trust me, it was fantastic. But because this was a play that, if converted, would have kept the Gophers in it, which is, indeed, worrisome.
The most powerful part of the day for me, however, was my departure from Minneapolis. It was my first time downtown since August, and I had not yet seen the site of the 35W bridge collapse. It’s haunting to see something like that which you see on TV so much and associate with such tragedy. In two years, I wonder what life will be like on the University of Minnesota campus, with the bridge a reconstructed memory and a new stadium on campus.

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Ok, now it’s Steve checking in with his take on the game. I agree mostly with Ryan’s take on the action on the field itself. I’m sure I’ll get into this more as the season goes on, but Brock Spack is a total idiot and needs to be fired immediately…actually he should have been fired about 8 years ago. Purdue gets into the shootouts that they do because of his extremely soft defensive schemes. They are almost always running a prevent-style defense with a zone coverage where they let receivers catch balls over the middle all game long. Watching on TV, there were several plays where you couldn’t even see ANY of the defensive backs in the picture before the ball was snapped because they were playing so far back. I think the only thing that saved Spack in the past was the talent that Purdue had on defense, and now there are a long list of those players enjoying successful NFL careers. Purdue currently is saddled with non-threatening defensive linemen and DBs that can’t tackle or catch, which makes for some pretty frightening moments when a ball is caught over the middle and a bunch of guys who can’t tackle are standing 15 yards up-field because they were told to stand there instead of cover receivers.

Now, on to the TV coverage of the game. I didn’t catch any of the announcers names but the coverage was hilariously bad. Before the game, the color guy mentioned about 10 times (and about another 15 during the game) that he had Purdue ranked in his TOP 5 OFFENSES (everything he said sounded like shouting). He never mentioned who the other 4 were or what kind of validity his list had to begin with. He also did a weather forecast style breakdown of the offense before the game where he stood in front of video of the team looking completely clueless and trying to jump out of the way of images of Dorien Bryant catching passes. During the game, he also liked to say guys were “HELL OF A PLAYER” only for the play-by-play guy to agree saying they were a “heck of a player.” The starting lineups were interesting to say the least. Joe Mauer did the Minnesota intros, which makes sense, but for Purdue they got JI…..JIM THOME to do it. When I think Purdue, I think Jim Thome, but he hit a homer there earlier in the day so I went along with it.

The shining star in all of this was the girl that did the sideline reporting. She got the most out of her Minnesota experience and went to all kinds of lengths to provide information for the game. After nearly getting run over by the marching band before the game, she went on to have all of these special reports. She actually filmed footage of herself helping the grounds crew after the Twins game by pulling out bases and flattening the pitchers mound. Then she mentioned how she called up Drew Brees, where I’m sure after asking, “who the hell are you and how did you get my number?” gave her some insight on Purdue’s team this year. She then had some on-location footage where she filmed herself at the I-35 bridge and later at the construction site of the new Gophers stadium (complete with token hard hat). I’m kind of hoping she does a game at Purdue one day so she can have an in depth interview with the guy that waters the grass and maybe film some footage of her dancing with the transvestites at the Neon Cactus, then getting hit on at Triple X at 3:30 AM. As a season ticket holder for Purdue, it would be worth missing a game for that….