Minnesota Basketball: 4 takeaways from 1st month of 2023-24 regular season

Ben Johnson’s hot seat keeps getting warmer

Although it was a surprising one, the Ben Johnson hire makes sense in retrospect. The Gophers wanted someone with deep ties to the state’s basketball community, and someone who viewed the program as a destination job. Add in the fact that, as a first-time head coach, Johnson came awfully cheap, you can understand why athletic director Mark Coyle made the decision he did.

One month into his third season at the helm, it simply has not worked out. It was always going to be difficult to follow up nearly a decade of Richard Pitino and Minnesota has never been an easy job, but it’s hard to justify the results we’ve seen from Johnson up to this point in his tenure. That’s particularly true when you consider all the other Big Ten programs that have cycled up in recent years, especially teams once nestled in the cellar alongside Minnesota like Northwestern and Penn State.

League play will tell us a lot about Johnson’s future in the Twin Cities. This is a much deeper and talented team than we saw a season ago so they should be able to at least put up a fight in many of the games they were completely uncompetitive in last winter, but will that result in more than two conference wins?

Progress remains the name of the game here at Minnesota, and the results of the season’s first month haven’t been super encouraging. That’s not to say there hasn’t been improvement, and a strong December could be exactly what this program needs to generate momentum before the meat of the conference schedule. But, plenty of work is yet to be done, and Johnson’s future may just depend on it.