Glory days still elude Gophers

Here we go again.

The University of Minnesota has been here before, dealing with the unpleasant task of hiring head coaches for its football and men's basketball programs. Usually it's due to some kind of scandal among the players or coaches, so thankfully this time it deals only with trivial issues such as wins and losses and poor attendance.

Yes, it's difficult to revel in being a Minnesota graduate these days.

The same was true during my undergraduate days when blunders from the football and basketball programs kept local scribes and on-air personalities busy at their crafts.

From revelations that football coach Lou Holtz allegedly dropped a wallet full of money for recruit Roselle Richardson and later bolted the "U" in a millisecond for the glamour of Notre Dame and Touchdown Jesus to the sexual assault case that decimated the basketball team's 1985-86 season and cost head coach Jim Dutcher and top assistant Jimmy Williams their jobs, my days on the Minneapolis campus featured a near-steady dose of bad news.

The 1990s weren't exactly filled with pleasantries, either. The football program under John Gutekunst and Jim Wacker reached new lows, while the basketball team became a disgrace toward the end of the decade when revelations of coach Clem Haskins' misdeeds became public.

Now as 2007 dawns, the university is again under scrutiny after forcing out basketball coach Dan Monson and football coach Glen Mason within a one-month period.

Academic scandals and criminal offenses are not the reasons this time -- embarrassment is. The basketball team had plunged off the Big Ten radar and was so bad at the start of the season that it lost to Division II Winona State in an exhibition game. The football team continued its string of record-setting losses in the Mason era by blowing a 31-point second-half lead to Texas Tech in the Insight Bowl.

Monson had lost the respect of the boosters, media and even his players by the end of a five-game losing streak that led him to accept a buyout of his contract by the end of November. But this was a long time in coming. Four of Monson's previous seven teams had finished ninth or worse in the conference and he posted a 36-60 Big Ten record, a paltry .375 winning percentage that even his staunchest defenders could not support. Fans already had tired of Monson's inability to bring in the state's top recruits, though he did enough late-night politicking to sway Duluth East graduate Rick Rickert into turning in his Arizona poncho for a Minnesota parka. But those successes were few and far between.

As far as football goes, Mason's teams performed at a higher level than his predecessors. The Gophers became a regular on the pre-New Year's Day bowl circuit with a running game and an offensive line that ranked with the nation's best on a yearly basis. However, trips to the Sun Bowl or the Music City Bowl did nothing to generate enthusiasm for a team that will be moving into a new on-campus stadium in 2009. The debacle in Tempe, Ariz., only gave athletic director Joel Maturi, a Chisholm native, ample reason to pull the trigger now.

Now the Gophers have to decide how to proceed. Do they retain interim basketball coach Jim Molinari or head outside the university and select a name coach? The Detroit Pistons' Flip Saunders, a former Gopher guard, and Texas Tech's Bobby Knight are among those whose names have been bandied about by the Twin Cities media.

Will they seek a big-name football coach such as Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts or perhaps his understudy at quarterback for the Gophers in the mid-1970s, Marc Trestman, most recently offensive coordinator at North Carolina State?

Either way, they still are attractive positions. Neither program is at the depths it was during my time at the "U" and they should be able to bring in quality candidates. But decisions need to be made promptly in order to keep next season from becoming a loss.

With the right coaches, alums like myself can stop burying their heads in the dirt like a gopher.

RICK WEEGMAN can be reached at (218) 723-5302, (800) 456-8181 or e-mailed at rweegman@duluthnews.com .