Brian Hamilton, who covered Gophers sports for several years at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and now works for Sports Illustrated, has an interesting piece Wednesday that attempts to get to the heart of the question that gets asked quite often from locals:
Why does the University of Minnesota athletic program seem to be a magnet for scandals and negative stories?
Hamilton goes through a significant list of examples from the past two decades, starting with the academic fraud scandal in the Gophers men's basketball program that broke in 1999, shortly before he moved here to cover the Gophers.
Writes Hamilton: Bad things happen at nearly every college. Academic missteps, inappropriate behavior thrust before anyone with an internet connection, bad administrators, mishandling extremely delicate sexual assault cases … sadly, none of this is unique to Minnesota. But all of it has happened at Minnesota, and having been there for a while, it does not seem to be the kind of place where oppressive pressure to succeed explains it all away.
He describes Gophers athletics as "realistically a mid-level business with fair-but-not-outsized expectations, and yet it all too consistently faces extraordinarily high-end humiliations."
It's hard to argue with that. In the big-money sports of football and men's basketball, being better than the majority of teams — not necessarily elite — is the marker of success in most people's eyes.
What's interesting, though, is Hamilton's diagnosis of why these things seem to keep happening here. Basically, it's the opposite of what I've been thinking about.
Writes Hamilton: "No one there is cynical enough. Or at least no one in charge seems to be cynical enough." His point is that he doesn't think Minnesotans (or at least U of M administrators) are good at diagnosing potential problems before they happen because they place too much faith in others to do the right thing.
