No offense, but some of the posts in this thread are too much.
Let me offer an alternate / insider perspective. One of my coworkers / good friends here in Minneapolis is a former Gophers basketball player. He is a former top 100 recruit, who had scholarship offers from St. John's, Uconn, Marquette [in the Tom Crean era], and Miami amongst others. Guy tore his ACL and ended up being a backup big for the majority of his career, but played against the likes of Greg Oden. He played there in the last decade, and is still fairly close to the program as a recent alum.
We've been going back and forth about this game ever since it got announced. This morning, we talked about the Wofford game, and he indicated that he doesn't read much into the shooting performance by Minnesota because it was against such a heavily overmatched opponent. He wasn't remotely impressed that they were able to press Wofford into oblivion, and is scared about the number of easy scores they'll give up playing that style when they play a good opponent that can handle their press. He said that Wofford was miniscule--their tallest starter was like 6-5--which is why their bigs had such strong games. His prediction is that we blow them out.
I'm not suggesting that this will come to pass. Or that we are going to come out and merely outclass Minnesota by walking on the floor on Monday. Quite frankly, i'm more concerned about this game than I was after the egg we laid on Monday on both ends of the floor [on a personal level, I'll never hear the end of it if we somehow lose to these guys on Monday--really, really, really want to win this !@#$ game]. But I think people are overstating how good Minnesota is by a WIDE margin. They have one good scoring guard [Andre Hollins] who is all big 10 caliber, and the rest of the squad is pretty untalented. They compensate with relentless full court pressing, with Dick Pitino emulating his father's system, but they are a one-trick pony. No doubt--they'll get hot from three early, but the question is whether or not they'll be able to sustain that, and whether or not their press bothers us. Their frontcourt is significantly depleted. Let me state that again: their frontcourt is lousy, and they are down several players.
Doesn't mean that we don't have to play well--certainly, better than we did on Monday--but let's stop pretending these guys are even top half of the Big Ten. Given the way they play, I view them as being a lot closer to Depaul than Michigan State.
Oh Lord
