sports

The report that Brewster was the new coach first surfaced late Monday afternoon. The initial reaction from the local sporting public seemed to be 90 percent negative. Within the other 10 percent, people were making the comparison to Iowa's hire of Kirk Ferentz after the 1998 season.

The link was this: The successful Ferentz was a low-profile assistant with the Baltimore Ravens, and the incoming Brewster was a low-profile assistant with the Denver Broncos.

That's where the comparison ends. The Iowans were upset over Ferentz's hiring because they wanted Bob Stoops, a former Hawkeye who had earned a big reputation as Florida's defensive coordinator.

Stoops was not offered the Iowa job and then was hired at Oklahoma. Ferentz was the choice of then-athletic director Bob Bowlsby.

Ferentz started 2-18, and the venom was unrelenting toward the coach and the AD. And then Ferentz started to win, and Iowa kept giving him raises to keep him from returning to the NFL.

Ferentz had spent nine years in the '80s as an Iowa assistant. Brewster admitted Wednesday that he hadn't been in Minnesota, other than at the airport, in 25 years.

His prior visit came when he was a tight end on the Illinois team that rallied to beat the Gophers 42-24 in a jam-packed Metrodome early in the 1982 season.

That game was recalled in Wednesday's Star Tribune, and stirred a memory in Bob Bradford, a Gophers loyalist from way back.

"The 1982 game against Illinois was the last time someone tried to buy my ticket for more than face value on the way into the Dome," Bradford wrote in an e-mail.

That's what you're dealing with here, Mr. Brewster -- not a nation but a Dinkytown.