I went to the Golden Gopher Fan Fest 2005 today. It was an open practice/scrimage in preparation for the upcoming football season. You can find the rest of the pictures that I took in the Fan Fest 2005 Set on Flickr.

Thank You Hawaii, for beating Northwestern 49-41 and ensuring a trip to sunny Nashville, TN for the Music City Bowl.

Saturday afternoon, a member of the Gophers football traveling party looked around Camp Randall Stadium and asked, “How do you compete with this?”

He wasn’t talking about the Wisconsin football team, which proceeded to beat the Gophers 38-14.

He was talking about the Wisconsin football experience, which established a similar advantage over a college game at the Metrodome.

Jim Souhan: Setting just says college football

It’s so true, the atmosphere at the metrodome is just anemic. None of the fans seem to care about the game at all.

Now jump to Camp Randall and the fans are going nuts the whole game. Not to mention the vast majority stay for the 5th quarter (after the football game is over) just to watch the marching band screw around and play a bunch of songs.

Why can’t we have that atmosphere at the U? I know a lot of people say it’s the metrodome… that you just can’t get a crowd pumped up in there. But certainly Vikings games are wild and crazy.. so much for that hypothesis. It doesn’t help that the dome is so far from campus, but I think that the U tries their hardest to have enough shuttle busses to get students back and forth.

I think Minnesota fans just don’t care. And that makes me sad.

Anyway, enough directionless ranting, just read the article above. It has a slightly different view, but agrees with me in most accounts.

The Gophers are back in the top 25 with their 45-0 victory over Illinois this weekend.

The AP Poll has us as #24 and the Coaches Poll at #23.

Awesome. Our victory over Indiana next week should move us up a little bit as well, in preparation for our game against WisconSIN.