Where football meets science; how the Gophers are preparing for their West Coast trip

For Gophers football fans who like checking out new destinations, visiting the sport’s cathedrals and even watching a game in a nontraditional setting, the 2025 road schedule is right up their alley. From a stop at the Horseshoe to play defending national champion Ohio State, to a jaunt to Kinnick Stadium to face Iowa, to the program’s first visit to Oregon and to a game in Wrigley Field against Northwestern, there’s a bit of everything to sample.

The road smorgasbord begins Saturday night with a new-ish destination — California — where the Gophers haven’t played since 2006. The trip to Berkeley is part of a home-and-home series that will see the Golden Bears visit Minneapolis in 2028. It serves as the Power Four nonconference test that Minnesota — led by athletic director Mark Coyle, executive deputy athletic director Dusty Clements and coach P.J. Fleck— tries to schedule each season.

“A lot of schools are in that pattern, especially in the Big Ten, where you’re scheduling a Power Four, a Group of Five and an FCS opponent [for nonconference games],” Fleck said. “Mark and Dusty do a really good job making our schedules.”

The past four seasons have featured home-and-home series against Colorado (2021 and ’22) and North Carolina (2023 and ’24), and this time the Gophers hit the West Coast for the third time in nonconference play under Fleck. They won the previous two — 48-14 at Oregon State in 2017 and 38-35 in double overtime at Fresno State in 2019 — plus beat UCLA 21-17 last year in a Big Ten game that drew an estimated 15,000 to 16,000 Minnesota fans to the Rose Bowl.

Saturday’s game at Cal won’t lure as many Minnesotans to the Bay Area as UCLA did to Pasadena, but they’re still expecting 5,000 to 7,000 fans to be in attendance. Steve Erban, co-owner of Stillwater-based travel company Creative Charters, said he’s filled two 50-slot excursions for a three-day trip and a four-day trip to San Francisco.

There’s considerable competition for the traveling fan’s money this year. Oregon is the most popular destination for Minnesota’s fans this year. Creative Charters has chartered a 190-seat plane for the Nov. 14 game at Eugene, Ore., and has only a few seats left according to Erban.

While fans will take in the sights and sounds of the Bay Area, this is strictly a business trip for Fleck and his team. The Gophers’ success in traveling west doesn’t come by accident. He consults with Dr. Michael Howell, director of the Sleep Performance Training for Athletes Program at M Health Fairview, and with other medical and nutritional personnel. Their aim is to formulate a plan where the Gophers will be prepared for an out-of-the-routine experience come kickoff.

Travel certainly can make a difference, especially when venturing two or more time zones away from home. Last year, the first in the Big Ten with its westward expansion — Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC — teams traveling multiple time zones for a game went 6-22.

Fleck has adjusted the Gophers practice and weight-lifting schedules this week to get the players used to the 9:30 p.m. (Central Time) kickoff time, adding in weight sessions at 9:30 p.m. In addition, the Gophers will limit the amount of time they’re actually in the Bay Area in an effort to stay on Central Time.

“The big thing we’re emphasizing is sleep – when you’re going to bed,“ Gophers linebacker Maverick Baranowski said. “The coaches are doing a great job, putting us in a position, giving us bedtimes, giving us wake-up times, giving us naptimes.”

Bedtimes? Naptimes? For a 230-pound linebacker with a tree trunk for a neck?

“It’s going great so far,” Baranowski said. “We’ve got to continue to be accountable to that schedule and let it rip at practice.”

“Sometimes, you had a four-day prep week. Sometimes, you had a 13-day prep week,” he said. “… It wasn’t just us throw it together."

Fleck’s time as an assistant with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers helped, too.

“You look at your past and different places that you’ve been, and you put it all together in a formula,” he said. “It’s never really the same. This trip is going to be a little bit different than our UCLA trip. It’s different than our Oregon State trip. It’s different than our Fresno trip.”

Redshirt freshman quarterback Drake Lindsey believes the team has adjusted well to the altered schedule and pointed to last year’s UCLA game as an example that went well.

“I remember waking up late at the hotel and having more time to prepare,” Lindsey said. “It’s a little different, but it’s really good to stress ourselves at that time of hour for this week.”