Minnesota Gophers fans should not feel bad about what happened against Ohio State

The Minnesota Gophers went into the Horseshoe and lost, but no one in Dinkytown should feel bad about what happened.

Looking at the box score of Saturday’s showdown at the Horseshoe between Ohio State and Minnesota makes it seem like it was a one-sided contest. Dwayne Haskins had bloated numbers that will ensure he remains in the Heisman conversation and the final margin of victory was more than two scores, but that wasn’t the whole story.

The Gophers are not a championship team. They will not be competing for a conference title this year and might very well go back-to-back years without a trip to a bowl game. But Ohio State is a title contender and could end up winning the National Championship, and the Gophers had them on the ropes for a good portion of Saturday’s game.

As a title contender should, the Buckeyes pulled away late and scored a garbage time touchdown to make the victory look more significant than it was. Some will argue that Minnesota simply caught Ohio State on a bad day, but that’d be overlooking what P.J. Fleck has brewing with his program.

Minnesota jumped out to an early lead, and despite coughing it up before halftime was able to stay within a score for almost the rest of the game. If not for a few mistakes — most notably 6-points left on the field by way of missed field goals — this game could have gone a different way. The Gophers are still a year or two away from realizing any true title dreams, but hopefully this was a the-bear-has-tasted-human-blood moment for a young Gophers team that doesn’t have to answer for sins of teams past.

With some time, which is never easy to buy in College Football, Fleck can very much turn the Gophers into a Big Ten title contender. He’s armed with a roster full of underclassmen and the better he gets them to play the more fruitful the recruiting grounds will be for Minnesota. Zach Annexstad, a freshman, went on the road against the No. 4 team in the country and finished with a passer rating of 118.7. Minnesota was more efficient on extending drives on third down than the Buckeyes, and outrushed them by almost 100 yards. That’s another seemingly small thing that should stir optimism: Ohio State has struggled on run defense this year, something that the Gophers took full advantage of by posting 179 yards. It’s not the most yards the Buckeyes have given up this year (TCU gashed them for 203), but the fact that the Gophers saw a weakness and were able to exploit it is a sign that this young team is growing.

One could dub the start of the Fleck era in Dinkytown as underwhelming. He came to town with such high expectations that missing a bowl game for the first time in five years seemed like starting on the wrong foot. But the Gophers shouldn’t be interested in limping into default bowl games, the Big Ten title is the goal. No college program, especially a Power 5 school, should be alright with settling for less and dashing its own national championship dreams.

Fleck has his work cut out, but the foundation is being laid for Minnesota to put to rest the mediocrity its become comfortable with and break into something better.