If you're a Gophers football fan and you're hoping to get a tan, here's what you do:

Go out and buy a piece of Oregon football apparel. A hat, maybe. Or a shirt that says, "Go Ducks!'' And then hope that Oregon beats Oregon State Saturday in the Civil War.

That Pacific-10 grudge match could determine whether the Gophers go to a desert or to Detroit come bowl time.

The Gophers slid into the postseason on a four-game losing streak, including a 55-0 whipping at the hands of Iowa in Minnesota's Metrodome finale Saturday night. It was a game in which nothing, save for Troy Stoudermire's kickoff returns, went right for the Gophers.

On the Gophers' first offensive play, a long snap bounced out of quarterback Adam Weber's hands, setting the tone for a night in which the offense never found a rhythm. The defense, a bend-but-not-break outfit most of the season, wore down during the course of the game.

A week off, then bowl preparation

The Gophers will have a team meeting early this week, then the players will take the holiday week off. The team that regroups to prepare for a bowl game will have a lot of work to do. After Saturday's loss, senior captain Steve Davis said the only consolation he and the other seniors had was knowing there was another game to play, another opportunity to finish the season on a high note.

It is also important for the program. To begin the season 7-1 and end it 7-6 is not the way to move into a new stadium.

"It's real big," coach Tim Brewster said after the game, talking about the upcoming bowl game. "And to me, it's not being in a bowl game, it's about winning a bowl game. We want to go and we want to win. We'll do a great job in our preparation, and it will help us as we go into next season."

But, where will the Gophers go next month?

That brings us back to the Oregon Ducks.

If Oregon State beats Oregon, the Beavers will represent the Pac-10 in the Rose Bowl against Penn State. And that would mean Southern California could be an extremely attractive one-loss team that likely would get gobbled up by the Fiesta Bowl as an at-large team. But if Oregon wins, that would send USC to the Rose Bowl and possibly give Ohio State a shot at the Fiesta Bowl. Actually, the Fiesta Bowl probably would have to choose between 10-2 Ohio State and perhaps 12-0 Utah.

There are seven bowl-eligible Big Ten teams. If Penn State and Ohio State were to wind up in BCS games, that keep the Gophers out of the Motor City Bowl, which is where the Big Ten's seventh selection is slated to go. In that scenario the Gophers likely would go to the Insight Bowl in Tempe, Ariz., to play the No. 6 team from the Big 12.

But if Penn State is the only Big Ten team in a BCS game, Detroit would be the most likely destination for the Gophers.

AD sees positives, negatives

"You can't get too high and you can't get too low," Gophers athletic director Joel Maturi said of the 7-5 Gophers. "I was excited about being 7-1, but you also have to be realistic. I'm not happy about [finishing the regular season] 0-4, but you have to be realistic. The good news is we went from 1-11 to 7-5. We're a better football team than we were a year ago. ... We are now beating, for the most part -- other than Michigan -- the teams that didn't have winning records. And yet, we haven't beaten anybody who is going to a bowl game."

So, Maturi said, the program has taken a step, with a bowl game to go.

No matter where they go, the Gophers will have to improve dramatically in the next month.

After the Iowa loss, Brewster said a key for the future would be to get stronger along both the offensive and defensive lines.

"We have to get more physical as a football team," he said. "That's something we'll focus on as we move forward."

For now, though, Brewster will have a month to get a little more out of the players he has, with the goal being a victory to carry into the offseason.