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. HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.