Ben Johnson’s dismissal and the appointment of Niko Medved as head coach have caused the Gophers to endure a turbulent offseason. The appeal of the Minnesota men’s basketball position has been discussed extensively, and Seth Davis, one of the leading voices in college basketball, went into greater detail about why he believes it to be one of the hardest positions in the Big Ten.
Davis has already expressed his thoughts on the Minnesota position, describing it as one of the most difficult in the nation due to a lack of funding, weather, and obsolete facilities. According to Davis, one of the primary reasons why success at Minnesota is difficult is because the Gophers have openly battled to raise competitive funding in the current NIL age of college athletics.
“I think Penn State is the worst job because I think Minnesota fans truly care about their basketball program. I don’t think that Penn State fans do. I have seen no evidence of that,” Davis said. “I would say Penn State is the worst, I would say Minnesota is the second worst, maybe, I’d probably say Nebraska. See, Nebraska, they also care, those fans turn out like crazy.”
Ranking the attractiveness of jobs in Division I men’s basketball is more nuanced than ever, due to the ongoing changes to the sport with NIL, conference realignment and the transfer portal, but Minnesota has won 1,733 games in the history of its program, which ranks 47th all-time. There are only 10 current Big Ten programs that rank higher.
The Gophers have only appeared in the NCAA Tournament 14 times and they’ve been to only one final four. Six of their 14 appearences in the big dance came between 1989 and 1999 under legendary head coach Clem Haskins.
“These are outdated measures. To answer this question, I’d say give me everybody’s NIL budget and let’s just rank them,” Davis continued. “The interesting school here, by the way, is Northwestern. Their record overall, historically, is worse than anybody’s; they had never been in the NCAA Tournament, I think 2016, if I am not mistaken, is when Chris Collins took them, so they’ve been there now three times.”
Now more than ever, college basketball has become a talent acquisition business. The teams with the best players tend to win the most games, and it would be naive not to admit that Minnesota is a step behind the majority of the Big Ten in that category.
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