Just 5 games in, this Minnesota season has become about so much more than football
Tragedy. Joy. Injury. Opportunity. Heartache. Heart.
Minnesota’s football season isn’t even half over. But it has already been fraught with reminders and results of the bigger picture beyond what shows on the scoreboard, pops up on your smartphone notifications, impacts your wagers (if you’re into that sort of thing) and flashes across TV screens throughout the Upper Midwest.
“Adversity’s always gonna come your way,” Golden Gophers quarterback Tanner Morgan said. “You don’t know how you’re going to see it, how you’re going to face it. It could come a million different ways.”
Morgan is a living witness to the highs and lows.
He lost his father to cancer earlier this year. During Minnesota’s bye week, he proposed to his girlfriend, Sarah Becraft (Morgan got the answer he was looking for).
“My dad knew she was the one probably before I did,” Morgan said.
Sorrow. Celebration.
Wideout Dylan Wright knows, too. He’s lost not one but two former high school teammates to gun violence in the past year. The Texas A&M transfer is back with the team after going home to Mesquite, Texas, to mourn the death of Utah running back Aaron Lowe that occurred Sept. 26.
Just in case you needed yet another reminder that life is fragile.
Running back Trey Potts knows. He spent 6 days in the hospital following the Gophers’ win over Purdue due to an undisclosed but “really scary” injury, according to coach PJ Fleck. With Mohamed Ibrahim already out for the year, run-happy Minnesota is down to its third- and fourth-string running backs and a changeup option in running quarterback Cole Kramer.
And yet how the Gophers will execute their zone run scheme this week against Nebraska seems trivial when you place yourself in that hospital room alongside Potts, where to his great credit athletic director Mark Coyle stayed overnight with the back and his family.
“You never expect things like that to happen,” said defensive lineman Nyles Pinckney, who transferred here from Clemson before the 2021 season.
You also don’t expect a returning starter on the offensive line to enter the transfer portal midseason. But that’s exactly what Curtis Dunlap Jr. did earlier this week.
It’s the second time Dunlap has considered jumping ship, sandwiched around a season-ending injury in 2020. He started at right guard in 2019 and appeared in all 5 games this season — but as a reserve.
Chris Autman-Bell gets it, too. This was finally his year as WR1, then he missed time early with a leg injury and is just now getting back into top playing shape.
Autman-Bell grew up in a violence-ridden town south of Chicago. But he’s the happiest guy you’ll ever meet.
“Bigger than football.” It’s a phrase you’ll hear Fleck say from time to time, and while a lot of his platitudes can grow tiresome, this one’s both real and relevant.
Heck, the whole “Row the Boat” thing was created to honor Fleck’s lost child when he was coaching at Western Michigan.
Maybe after 2020, we need the refresher. Our great game is back, and it’s been amazing to see fans in the stands at Huntington Bank Stadium. The pandemic isn’t over, but we’re allowed to get together and tailgate again. There are things we’ll never take for granted after enduring the height of the pandemic.
Maybe perspective is one of them.
And yet they will play another football game Saturday, at 11 a.m. CT on ESPN2. It’ll pit middling Minnesota — a team that hung with No. 6 Ohio State and shut out Colorado but somehow lost to Bowling Green — against what some people have joked is “the best 3-4 team” in the nation in Nebraska. The Huskers have lost to three top-10 teams by one score each.
And it’s here that the analogy sport affords us comes in, paradoxically inviting us to look at the big picture beyond the box score and find things for which to be grateful even during such a chaotic time.
Both teams have no choice but to press forward.
“It’s all about responding, just coming together as a team, as a family in unity,” said Morgan, who has struggled to complete passes this year but handled the resulting criticism with aplomb. “We just have to keep responding.”