The following article was written by Patrick Reusse, columnist for the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, on August 13.  I cut it out and saved it
because I thought it would be interesting reading for hockey-lers.  The
column provides a very objective and accurate assessment of the Gopher hockey
program and the tremendous recruiting advantage they have over all other
schools.  This non-biased assessment is very refreshing considering most
Twin Cities articles contain much pro-Gopher bias.
The article makes excellent points regarding how Gopher fans view every
other team in the country as inferior because they use players from
Canada.  Ask any WCHA fan and he/she will tell you this belief is VERY
strong and often voiced by Gopher fans.  Attend any Gopher home game and
you'll hear the Canadian players being verbally insulted by the fans.
Gopher fans seem to think every school in the country should be content
with having a poor program and use only Americans.
It is also interesting that this belief by the Gopher faithful is also
the first thing that is brought up every time they lose a game.
Anyway, here is the article, you can generate your own opinions:
 
"RICH HARVEST, REAPING LITTLE"
Titles, not talent, elude 'U' hockey
 
There was another reminder last week of the embarrassment that hangs over
the University of Minnesota hockey program.  The Gophers went into the
back yard of the Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs and signed Dave Spehar,
already a legendary sniper with one prep season remaining.
This was more dramatic evidence the Gophers are able to select and sign
the best Minnesota hockey players year after year.  These are not so much
the Gophers as they are the Minnesota All-Stars, the best
18-to-23-year-olds this state can produce.
Blessed with these riches, Minnesota has avoided winning a national
championship for 16 years.  Since Herb Brooks won his third title for the
Gophers in 1979, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Lake Superior State have
all won three Division I championships.  Bowling Green, RPI, Michigan
State, Harvard, Northern Michigan, Maine, and Boston University also have
titles.
During that time, the Gophers have lost twice(1980 and 1989) in the
championship game and they have choked six times in the national
semifinals.
There are two significant youth hockey states in this country:
Massachusetts and Minnesota.  If this was football, these states would be
Florida and California, and Canada would be Texas.
The Massachusetts players are divided fairly equally among more than a
dozen schools with Division I hockey in New England.  The most talented
Canadian players go into the top level of junior hockey and on to the
pros.  The lesser players play a couple of years of junior hockey, then
are dispersed across colleges in the northern tier of the United States.
Among the 40-some colleges that have Division I hockey, only the Gophers
have a monopoly on the best prospects in a large, choice area.  When it
comes to inherent advantages, Minnesota playing against St. Cloud State,
UM-Duluth, North Dakota, and Wisconsin is the equivalent of Nortre Dame
choosing to play football in the Mid-American Conference.  Our football
Gophers have made that choice - taking on hated Ball State in the
much-anticipated 1995 opener - but the Minnesota gridders are a story of
humiliation and degregation that will wait for another time.
The issue here is a hockey program that needs to do nothing more than ask
the best players within its talent-filled borders to attend, and those
players will show up at the new Maricucci Arena, ready to blow away all
comers - until it really, really counts.
The most recent examply of this crucial failing occured in late March in
Providence, R.I.  Everything fell in place on that Thursday to allow
coach Doug Woog to end his first decade on the job with his first
national championship.
Maine and high-powered Michigan played all-afternoon - into a third
overtime - before Maine pulled off the upset.  Then, senior-laden Boston
University came out and played two terrible periods against the Gophers.
A tired, undertalented Maine team would be waiting in the Saturday
final.  A nervous B.U. team was in the locker room, tied 3-3 after two
periods, and frightened that its last chance for an NCAA title was
disappearing.  So what happened?  The Gophers gagged in the third period
and wound up 7-3 losers.
Minnesota has won 70 percent of its regular-season games with Woog and
his predecessor, Brad Buetow.  There is a reason for that.  Murray
Warmath explained it years ago, when asked about the Michigan-Ohio State
domination of Big Ten football.
"Those two schools win because they are sitting right in the middle of
the cabbage patch,", Warmath said.
The cabbages to which Warmath referred were exceptional high school
football players.  The cabbages in Minnesota are exceptional high schoool
(and local junior) hockey players.  Woog and his coaches can reach into
that cabbage patch, look over the crop from top to bottom and take their
choice.
Last week, they chose Duluth East's Dave Spehar, plucking him away from
Mike Sertich, the underdog coach of the hometown Bulldogs.  When Spehar
gets to Minnesota in the fall of 1996, he will be joining players such as
Mike Crowley, Ryan Kraft, Erik Rasmussen, Wyatt Smith, and Reggie Berg.
Woog's talent will be stacked to an almost ludicrous level.
There are only two things more ludicrous surrounding this hockey program:
1) the monopoly on the state's talent has failed to produce a national
championship in the '80s or '90s: and 2) the idea the puckheads pass
along that somehow the Gophers are being noble in recruiting only
Minnesota kids.
There are only three cabbage patches for college hockey.  The Gophers
have complete harvesting rights in the best one.  Woog and his coaches
would have to be idiots to look elsewhere.
Spehar offered this explanation for his decision: "Everybody up here
hated the Gophers, but it was because they were so good.  I've always
wanted to be a Gopher since then."
The sniper had a chance to stay home, to try to lift those overmatched,
underpublicized Bulldogs to the heights they briefly enjoyed with Brett
Hull and Bill Watson.  Instead he chose to be a front-runner, to play his
hockey in shiny Mariucci Arena, for the Minnesota All-Stars.
Crowley. Kraft. Rasmussen. Smith. Now Spehar.
If the Gophers go a couple more seasons without a national championship,
U.S. attorney David Lillehaug - after his highly efficient prosecution of
Qubilah Shabazz - might have to consider a goal-shaving investigation.
 
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