As the good ship Twins settles to the bottom of the lagoon, the seasons have already changed to football and hockey around here.

We get to find out plenty about the UMD women’s hockey team in the next nine days. After tying and beating Connecticut, the Bulldogs come home to AMSOIL Arena for their two biggest home series of the season. This weekend, they face Wisconsin -- their first big rival, back when the two started college hockey programs a dozen years ago -- for a WCHA-opening series at AMSOIL. And next weekend, Minnesota comes to AMSOIL to take on the Bulldogs.

That means by the end of next weekend, we’ll have a good idea whether UMD’s once-dominant women’s team will rise to the level of contender again, or will they be middle-of-the-pack chasers. It’s as simple as that.

Wisconsin should be strong, as usual, under coach Mark Johnson. And Minnesota lost some skilled players, and also has lost star Amanda Kessel, to take a year off to recover from a concussion. So both the Badgers and Gophers might be just a notch off the high standard they;ve set for the last half-dozen years. Against that, UMD has got to be better, if they can get some young scorers into high gear right away. Coach Shannon Miller stresses defensive responsibility first and foremost, but the Bulldogs couldn’t score last year, and it took them out of contention.

Curiously, the Saturday night game will conflict directly with UMD’s 6 p.m. football game, against Minnesota State-Moorhead. The Bulldogs keep pulling magic tricks out of their helmets, with none being more dramatic than rallying at Winona to stun Winona State 28-21. The offense found some touchdowns, but again it was the defense that squelched Winona under pressure, first forcing a three-and-out at a critical time in the fourth quarter, and then stopping Winona State on its overtime possession.

The Bulldogs are due for a larger margin of victory, and maybe MSU-Moorhead will comply. Watch for the same formula -- Lauders and Sikorski rushing hard, and Bauer passing and running to form a triple-threat attack.

As for the Gophers hockey team, we knew that Michigan was a scattered, inconsistent group, and surely there will be a clamoring for a coaching change. Losing the Little Brown Jug to Minnesota might be the crowning touch. And I think coach Jerry Kille might have put one over on the Wolverines.

Twin Cities news accounts all last week talked about how Mitch Leidner is still out, but how the pressure was on for his backup to complete more than the one pass he completed against San Jose. Then came the big game at the big house with the big crowd in Ann Arbor, and Leidner not only shows up, he plays and completes 14 of 22 pass attempts, and proved that his shaky play at the start of the season was not because he’s shaky, and if he needed a big game against the Wolverines, he got it.

Now we’ll see if Michigan is simply worse than we suspected, or if the Gophers might be for real, and become a contender in the West half of the Big Ten.

The Minnesota Vikings kept pace with the Green Bay Packers with big victories. For the Vikings, their scattered play made it seem they could never pull it back together without the banished Adrian Peterson. But rookie Teddy Bridgewater took the reins and played as though he always had been destined to lead the Purple into battle. He passed well, with a lot of dart-like bullets, and a few soft-touch lobs, and he ran with amazing dexterity, providing another threat for the Atlanta Falcons that they couldn’t contain.

Detroit continues to pretty much alternate between great games and lousy performances, and that may continue through the season. Much like the Chicago Bears. The Black and Blue Division might end up with four .500 teams, unless the Packers get on a roll, which is possible. But Aaron Rodgers can’t do it alone.

Hockey season got going in the region last weekend, when the Minnesota Wilderness opened home-ice play in Cloquet against the defending North American Hockey League champion Fairbanks Ice Dogs.
    Cloquet may be close to the Wilderness to some, but come on, Fairbanks is hardly the resort capitol of the universe. Interesting pace, and results, as the Wilderness jumped ahead 2-0, blew the lead, and the teams traded goals up to 3-3 before Jake Forbort scored the game-winner for Minnesota. The next night, Ryan Anderson replaced Patrick Munson in goal and blanked the Ice Dogs 3-0.

Then there is the UMD volleyball team, which continues on the road at Winona State and Upper Iowa this weekend. At this point, having played only two matches at home out of seven road matches and two tournaments, the Bulldogs have six consecutive matches without losing a single game. Amazing.

John Gilbert has been writing sports for over 30 years. Formerly with the Star Tribune and WCCO. He currently hosts a daily radio show on KDAL AM.

Twins Falter as Football Hits Lofty Peak

It made for the ideal transition weekend, to have the Minnesota Twins sputter to a last-place finish in baseball, while Minnesota’s collection of top college and pro football teams were all celebrating inspired victories.

The Vikings turned loose Teddy Bridgewater, who maybe should be called “Teddy Icewater” if you evaluate his cool demeanor, and romped to a surprising 41-28 victory over Atlanta. That came one day after the University of Minnesota went to Ann Arbor and stunned 102,000 fans into silence with a dominating 30-14 victory over Michigan, returning with the Little Brown Jug. UMD, meanwhile, went to Winona fell behind for most of the game, trailing 16-6 in the fourth quarter before rising up to swipe a 28-21 victory over Winona State.

The transition continued as the end of baseball’s regular season also coincided with the opening of hockey. In women’s college play, UMD went to Connecticut and played a 4-4 tie before winning 3-0. And the Wild exhibition season is getting more serious, and they are looking more and more like serious competitors.

The Twins gave it their best shot at spoiling Detroit’s pennant-clinching party, by scoring 23 runs during two straight victories in Detroit, but then David Price restored order with a 4-hitter in a 3-0 shutout that gave Detroit the flag.

It also ended the Twins season at 70-92, the fourth straight year of over 90 losses, and the Twins were an equal-opportunity loser, splitting their 70-92 record equally between 35-46 marks both at home and on the road. That’s difficult to do, even if you were trying.

The result of all those results was the firing of manager Ron Gardenhire. The Twins finished at the bottom of the American League Central, and the worst record of all but Texas, Colorado and Arizona in all of Major League baseball. We all can suggest debates about what was the biggest reason for their failure. So consider these, and rank them in your own personal order:

• A boatload of money was spent on a variety of starting pitchers, but only Phil Hughes earned the money, with a 16-10 record and a 3.52 earned run average. Hughes was the only starter under a 4.00 ERA.
• oe Mauer had enough injury problems to miss significant time this season, and while he crept up to a final .277 average, it was the worst season of his career.

• The Twins outfield looked a lot like a new reality TV show, named “You, too, can be a major league outfielder,” while Denard Span, Ben Revere, Carlos Gomez -- three outstanding former Twins center-fielders -- starred for other teams, to say nothing of National League batting champion Justin Morneau, and his Colorado teammate, Michael Cuddyer, and go0d ol’ Torii Hunter.

• More often than not, the Twins fielded a starting lineup that consisted of mostly players who should have been developing further in the minor leagues.

As for Gardenhire? He took one of the most eager but immature collection of ballplayers and, without ever whining to the media about bad starting pitchers, bad infielders, bad outfielders, a lack of power, and inconsistent hitting, just kept putting together a lineup and encouraging them with praise, even when none seemed possible.

No, because you can list the four critical problems in any order you choose, you cannot list Ron Gardenhire’s managing ahead of any of them. And to be fair, with those four in concert, game after game, Gardenhire can only be exonerated of any blame. Name another Major League manager who could have done better with the collection of Twins.


For a time, I blamed Gardenhire for never allowing a pitcher who seemed to be in a groove to pitch one more inning, instead pulling the starters after 100 pitches, even if they were sailing for five or six innings. I reversed my position when, later in the season, Gardenhire did let a couple pitchers go an extra inning -- with disastrous results. The Twins starters had this incredible problem of looking strong for three, four, or five innings then completely coming undone with the chance to go one more inning.

At the end, I was impressed with Ron Gardenhire’s willingness to try aggressive play -- going for a late-inning double steal to set up Mauer for a 2-run single, for example. And through it all, Gardenhire was gracious, even pleasant, about answering some post-game questions that might have been cloaked cheapshots. And he was amazingly pleasant to several writers-turned-broadcasters who have said for months that the Twins would have to, and should, fire Gardenhire.

He’s been a fixture with this club, and the Twins players all insist they love playing for the guy, who is a player’s manager, all the way. The Twins want him to stick around in a background position, but he wants to keep managing, and who can blame him?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could regain the services of Hunter, Span, Revere, Gomez, Morneau, Cuddyer, and several prime-time starting pitchers on other teams, and put them all back into Twins uniforms?  With them, the Twins would have inverted, and right now they might be embroiled with a sudden burst of consistency, while Gardy would be out there a couple times to debate with an umpire