Your B1G Team is Dirt: Minnesota Edition

(*Author’s note: this will be a recurring series designed to attack, dismember, and generally shit-talk every Big Ten team in the conference. We will try to get all the teams in before the season starts, but will probably forget about Maryland because everyone forgets about Maryland.

You might be saying to yourself, don’t we need less hate in the world right now? To which I would respond: nah, fam. Sports hate is the fuel for the combustion engine of our collegiate football lives. We need more. I want all hot tubs cold. I want to turn this column into the Playa Hater’s ball and I want to do it with a toothpick digitally hanging out of my mouth and a mink coat on while I sneer at your for being offended.

If you want actually good/funny writing in this similar style, might I recommend Why Your Team Sucks by Drew Magary over at Defector, whom I will be full on Vanilla Icing this idea from.

You see, Magary’s writing goes “ding-ding-ding-digga-ding-ding” and this post will go “ding-ding-ding-digga-ding-ding, duh ding-ding-ding-digga-ding ding. See there’s that little extra ding. So, please don’t sue me, better version of Deadspin.)

Ahhhh, yes.

Here we are, B One G fans.

We’ve had the offseason. We’ve had the long, tantric preamble of spring football. We’ve had the grotesquely money-hungry, Succession-style powerplay by the SEC and the shivering cowardice of the Big 12 that happens every year around this time. That means it’s August and it’s time to start thinking about anything other than this godforsaken month with too much baseball and not enough days that are less than 94 degrees.

Before we being with The Minnesota Golden Gophers, a team that sounds like a perverse sex act that teenagers would inadvertently stumble upon while in Incognito Mode on their Dad’s work laptop, let’s take a minute to reflect on the state of the league.

Let’s start with our fearless leader: You’re dirt, Kevin Warren.

You’re dirt because I wouldn’t trust you to lead a 10-meter road race down an abandoned, one way street.

I wouldn’t trust Kevin Warren to lead a bachelorette party to an Instagram post.

I wouldn’t trust Kevin Warren to lead a flash flood downhill.

Sure, in a fall sports season dealing with a global pandemic, Warren was put into a lose/lose situation. But then inexplicably managed to lose/lose/lose/lose/lose.

Warren needed to navigate a tricky situation. But, instead of trying to delicately manage atop the balance beam he was afforded, he waffled and flopped and stumblefucked his way to a plethora of mistakes.

He made 10 mistakes. But, there was actually 14 mistakes, we just kept the same outdated numeral scheme because: tradition!

After we survived the Titanic of a year with the one guy who managed to be the iceberg and the Captain of the ship, we have miraculously emerged on the other end of the weird Covid year that was and now we get to start all over again: with Kevin Warren at the helm.

God help us all.

Minnesota Golden Gophers: You are D1rt!

Why are you dirt?

Because your head coach is a piece of shitty wall art at a shitty boutique that some rich guy’s wife opened for tax purposes. Because PJ Fleck is “Live, Laugh, Love” in human form. Because your cliché-vomiting leader can’t stop yelping out lines that sound like they’re in a Hallmark Christmas movie’s third act.

Take this recent quote. What in the fortune-cookie-fuck is this supposed to mean? It sounds like a line from Nicolas Cage movie that went straight to VOD before Covid made that a requirement.

You’re dirt because this flaccid pile of coach-isms thinks that he needs to come sprinting out of the tunnel first to try to prove that he’s not still some “_____insert white guy verbs here about hard work and toughness and lunch pails and shit_____” at his DIII college when no one paid attention to him.

You’re dirt because your program had an 11–2 record in 2019 that everyone else knew was clearly a veneer, covering the rotten molars underneath, but you insisted was the start of “something” and the moment your team had even the slightest scintilla of a microscopic amount of pressure, you collapsed like the other football stadium in your frozen-tundra-ass town:

You’re dirt because your quarterback regressed so hard last year that he was actually rewinding like a rented copy of Mall Rats at a Duluth Blockbuster in 1997.

You’re dirt because even your Wikipedia page is fine giving you two middle fingers and a super patronizing entry in the contents section.

You’re dirt because you’ve been in the Big Ten Conference — or whatever it was called back when Grover Cleveland was primping his mustache in the oval office — for 125 years and you have 7 outright conference championships.

Your trophy case is zombie-movie, post-apocalypse barren. It’s as deserted as a Kevin Warren support rally. Winter isn’t coming to Minnesota. It never left.

You’re dirt because your stadium serves beer.

Sorry, I left out a couple words. Your stadium has to serve beer.

Because you can go 11–2 and still only average a paltry 46,000 coverall wearing, bratwurst-lipped, “You-betchas” in the stadium and people can buy beer while their in attendance? You are dirt.

Finally, you’re dirt because your entire program is obsessed with collecting the meaningless trinkets of rivalry games that litter your schedule, the tacky-ass chachkies that you think signify a big game, but don’t matter to anyone who isn’t wearing a Minnesota jersey in the fall.

You desperately try to collect these MacGuffins like they’re the Ring of Power, not realizing that this try-hard, breathlessness is so cloying and desperate that only a true half-wit dweeb like PJ Fleck would want them. In reality, they look like they belong on a shelf in a wood-paneled room at your grandmother’s house that you notice right before you wonder if it’s time to submit an audition tape to Hoarders.

Ski-U-Mah! Which is an ancient word, derived by the Minnesotan forefathers during the state’s early frontier days and means: you are dirt.