Crazy to think how good the Minnesota Golden Gophers football program was!
Building the dome and moving off campus really did not help their situation.
It has always been a bit of a head-scratcher for me too as to why Minnesota has struggled so much in football while a school like Wisconsin seems to always have a good to great season. One does not seem to have a particular advantage over the other at first glance in terms of location, weather etc. The Twin Cities are a much larger metro area than Milwaukee etc. The program Alvarez built obviously has been sustained by and large and that alone gives the Badgers the upper hand but I just feel like the U should be stronger than they are.
Wisconsin really didn't rise up until Barry Alvarez got there in 1990. Took over a bad program and turned into a national powerhouse that you see now. And as other schools like Georgia, Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma, Michigan, Auburn and others have proven, you don't need to be in a big city to be successful.
But it is kinda weird how Minnesota couldn't sustain the success they had in the early 1900s. Maybe to recruits stopped going there because of the weather. Maybe other programs just started getting better and making a name for themselves.