Big Ten Basketball: Each team’s worst performance of the last decade
By Joey Loose
Minnesota
March 5, 2016 (at Rutgers 75, Minnesota 52) (GS: 0)
In my Pac-12 article, I briefly mentioned Minnesota’s upset win over UCLA back in 2013. For Golden Gophers fans, however, that game is their only NCAA Tournament win since their vacated Final Four in 1997. This program hasn’t had a great amount of success, bouncing from former Kentucky coach Tubby Smith to Richard Pitino, son of another former Kentucky coach. They also even managed to be upset by Middle Tennessee, though as a 5-seed instead of a 2-seed.
In lieu of mentioned a laundry list of rough games, we’re just going to dive into the winner, the only Minnesota game of the last decade with a Game Score of 0. There could be worst games for this program, but it’s hard to top the Golden Gophers’ abysmal performance against an awful Rutgers team, handing them their only Big Ten win in the final game of the regular season.
An awful string of 17 losses (including one you’ll see later on) was broken by Rutgers’ victory, and it was not a close game at all. Rutgers sprinted out to a 21-2 start, eventually leading 40-15 at the half en route to the easy win. Mike Williams scored 29 for Rutgers off the bench, dropping six 3-pointers. Minnesota’s offense was very stale, shooting just 30% from the field with 16 turnovers and they were never in this game.
Losing to that Rutgers team was bad enough, but Minnesota was completely outclassed by a team that was 0-17 in conference play. A few years have passed and Minnesota is still trying to figure things out (a 34-point loss to Purdue this past season was almost my pick). Richard Pitino might not be the answer, but who knows what the question even is for Minnesota these days.