Geezo-beezo, Wackie's back! (But without the humor.)

Jeannie and I had season tickets to Gopher football in 2004 and 2005. We watched the highest scoring, best-running team in the nation, maybe the best ever, with Marion Barber III and Lawrence Maroney sharing the backfield.

We counted first downs, we laughed, we cried, we watched a team than won more often than it lost. A team that took back the Little Brown Jug after twenty years or so, that was a perennial bowl team (not BCS), a team we followed to Nashville to watch beat the Crimson Tide. There were seven bowls in eight years.

None of that was good enough for the whiners, some of whom sat around us in the dome, unhappy with everything they saw, stuck in another era.“We need a new coach,” they whined. “Ok, but who are you going to get,” we asked? “Mike Grant,” was the answer. “What,” we asked? They wouldn’t be that dumb, we thought. Grant is a middle-aged high school coach, even if he is Bud Grant’s son.

The University didn’t hire Grant. They were able to do worse – much worse. They hired an ex-high school coach. One who was last a head coach twenty years before, and then of a nondescript parochial school for a-less-than-notable four years. And Punky Brewster is a “geezo-beezo” blowhard in the best tradition of another unsuccessful Gopher coach, Jim Wacker (rest his soul).

Punky managed to start his Rodent “career” with the worst record in Gopher history (1-11)claimed his 7-6 record in 2008 as a “turnaround,” and then fired his assistants and threw out his much ballyhooed “spread offense.” (How’s that working for you Wolverine fans?)

“It’s the Metrodome,” they whined. So, here we are, with “The Bank,” the shiny new “TCF Bank Stadium” on campus, where the Rodents are now 1-2 with a sloppily-played loss to the Badgers.

As an excuse for poor attendance that won’t wash. A little rain today, there were those empty seats again, and along with it, perhaps not a “sea” of (Badger) red, but a damn big lake.

Punky got his hand slapped for recruiting violations this week, and had to suspend two players for undisclosed transgressions. Football players were reported to be involved in a campus altercation mid-week. As much as I love football and the Gophers, it’s the ultimate futility to recruit thugs that lose. Northwestern loses because it doesn’t recruit human flotsam. What’s Brewster’s excuse?

Wacker was 6-16 after two seasons, Brewster was 8-17. The “Brewster era” is now 11 – 19. All we can hope for is an early end to this "era," because Rodent football is going nowhere…in a shiny, new $200 million stadium.