It looks like the Gophers men’s basketball team, with a 24-9 record entering Sunday’s NCAA tournament pairings announcement, will end up with a seed in the Nos. 5 to 7 range, McKinley Boston said.
Boston, who spent nine years as Gophers athletics director and as a university vice president, also spent five years on the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection committee. He has retired as athletics director at New Mexico State but follows Minnesota, his alma mater, closely.
“The challenge (the Gophers) will have is that the Big Ten as a conference isn’t rated as strong as it has been historically,” Boston said.
The game the Gophers don’t want, Boston cautioned, is if they’re a No. 5 seed and have to play the No. 12 seed.
“The five-seed against the 12-seed historically has been the game for most upsets,” Boston said. “So if they can avoid the five, they should consider themselves lucky.”
Meanwhile, Boston, 71, has been doing some consulting and playing lots of golf, he said, as a 14-handicapper. A defensive tackle for the Gophers’ last Big Ten championship football team, he plans to attend the team’s 50-year reunion in Minneapolis this fall. He is one of 10 Gophers from that 1967 team who received an opportunity to play in the NFL.
Boston resides in Las Cruces, N.M., but will move to his native North Carolina within a year.
The Vikings’ loss of free agent Captain Munnerlyn to Carolina is significant. Now the team has to find a cornerback replacement, and that will be a challenge. It’s clear that Munnerlyn, 28, wanted to return to his first NFL team, and a $6 million signing bonus with $10.5 million guaranteed made it an easy decision.
It’s clear that the Vikings want to sign another wide receiver. Meanwhile, popular hometown restricted free agent Adam Thielen, if he remains in Minnesota, can expect a contract worth at least $15 million guaranteed.
The Vikings also have to figure out what to do about a serviceable backup quarterback. Teddy Bridgewater (severely dislocated knee) is not expected back next season, and maybe not in 2018, either. Backup Shaun Hill is 37 years old.
The Vikings have until a couple of days after April’s NFL draft to extend by a year the players they chose in the first round three years ago. That would be Bridgewater and linebacker Anthony Barr.
They won’t be extending Bridgewater because of the seriousness of his injury. But if Bridgewater spends the entire 2017 season on the physically unable to perform list, his contract, worth $2.2 million this year, automatically gets extended for 2018, albeit for a relatively small amount.
Bridgewater, 24, probably wouldn’t be thrilled about that because it would be a relatively meager amount, in the $3 million range, for a QB.
It won’t be surprising if the Vikings offer ex-Gophers QB Mitch Leidner a free-agent opportunity as a developmental guy.
It also wouldn’t surprise if Hill ends up in Oakland with Mike Tice, the former Vikings head coach now Raiders’ offensive line coach who brought him to him to Minnesota. Both attended the University of Maryland.
It’s still anybody’s guess about Adrian Peterson’s next destination, but it won’t be Minnesota. Oakland now looks like a decent fit for the future hall of fame running back, but latest word is the New York Giants are interested, too.
Peterson will have to give up contract money. Peterson, who turns 32 in nine days, is expected to seek a free-agent deal worth at least $7 million a year, and he’s not going to get that. What he will get is a smaller contract laden with incentives. The Vikings rejected the $18 million for which he was signed for next season.
The Vikings are expected to replace Peterson with a running back from the draft. Green Bay Packers free agent Eddie Lacy is a possibility, though. Lacy was expected to visit Seattle before the Vikings, and the Packers remain a consideration.
A Vikings deal for the overweight Lacy, who turns 27 in June, would also have to include a lot of incentives in order to motivate him, and he would be viewed as a one-year guy. Viking Jerick McKinnon is more a third-down back than a regular back.
Tier I of free agency already is over. Football isn’t like baseball, which allows time — sometimes months — for signings. In football, generally within 24 hours of the opening of free agency, top players are gone. Then comes Tier II signings for lesser contracts.
The Vikings overpaid for free-agent offensive linemen Riley Reiff and Mike Remmers, but they had no choice because of the team’s ineptitude at that position. Not signing them would have made it difficult for QB Sam Bradford to remain healthy this year.
Left tackle Reiff’s contract guarantees him $26.3 million; right
tackle Mike Remmers’ deal guarantees $10.5 million.
Reiff is a decent player but for the Vikings probably would have been better at right tackle. Reiff has to play left tackle because the Vikings couldn’t sign a decent left tackle. Exceptional offensive linemen remain hard to find.
A problem for NFL teams is that in college, because so many schools now play spread offenses, offensive linemen don’t even set up in three-point stances. That makes it difficult in the limited off-season for NFL coaches to teach them pro techniques. So a lot of drafted offensive linemen aren’t ready to play right away, prompting the signing instead of veteran players at premium prices.
Remmers isn’t a great player, but the Vikings had to find somebody to play right tackle — there was no way they could go with clumsy T.J. Clemmings again.
The Vikings still have about $27 million in salary cap space, which is pretty good. Some of that will be used to sign a cornerback, and maybe a defensive lineman considering Sharrif Floyd’s unreliability. Another wide receiver is likely, too.
It seems unlikely the Vikings will re-sign Cordarrelle Patterson, who is a terrific kick returner but still a gimmick player, and unreliable as a receiver.
Whether the Vikings will extend Bradford, 29, who is signed for $18 million next season but can become a free agent after the season, remains an intriguing question. The Vikings could wait to see how well he plays this year, and if he remains healthy, then extend him. Or they could put the franchise tag on him after the season.
If the Vikings do extend Bradford with a long-term deal before next season, and he regresses to his undistinguished form, they would regret paying him a deal that probably would have to guarantee nearly $40 million.
Wild owner Craig Leipold finally has a legitimate contender for a Stanley Cup. Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor’s team finally is on a serious playoff path.
“I do pay attention to the Wild and I’m very happy for the team, the ownership and for the fans,” Taylor said. “They have been through a lot of tough years with injuries, et cetera, just like we have. And now maybe they will go all the way.
“And yes, a person like me looks at them and says I think we are doing some of the same things that they do — they went with some young stars and put the right people and right coach around them. I think we’ve got a number of those things done. We probably have a few things left, getting some guys with a little more experience off the bench helping our guys.”
Entering Saturday’s game in Milwaukee, the surging Wolves had won eight of the past 12 games, including Friday night’s eye-opening 103-102 victory over Golden State in front of a record Target Center crowd of 20,412.
“Gradually we’ve seen improvement; the last three weeks, that curve has moved up a little bit faster,” Taylor said. “We’re playing better defense, we have not collapsed when other teams played better defense, and we’ve had some nice comebacks and held off the pressure.
“And we won our share of those kinds of games. I feel really good about that. I haven’t changed my attitude that we should be playing for the playoffs.”
The Twins, who got off to a 1-6 start in 2015, then 0-9 last year, when they finished with a baseball-worst 103 losses, are putting special emphasis on a good start this season.
“That’s imperative for our club in 2017,” president Dave St. Peter said.
Ex-Gophers cornerback Jalen Myrick, who zoomed to a 4.28-seconds 40-yard dash at the NFL combine last week, two years ago on a GPS tracking device had his speed clocked at 23.4 miles per hour.
Only eight players have broken 4.3 seconds in the last 12 years of the combine, according to NBC Sports.
All 5,250 tickets for Tony Dungy’s “Arise with the Guys” gathering on April 8 at Grace Church in Eden Prairie have been sold. The Hall of Fame coach is bringing future Hall of Fame QB Peyton Manning and former NFL MVP QB Rich Gannon with him.
Dungy, the former Gophers QB, and wife Lauren are doing well with their seven adopted children.
After a 20-2-3 season, the University of St. Thomas’ Jon Lowery, a former All-Big Ten soccer player at Ohio State, has been named Division III National Soccer Coach of the Year by D3soccer.com.
Former Minneapolis North legend Khalid El-Amin will be analyst for some of www.prepspotlight.tv’s high school basketball tournament coverage.
That was Sean Sweeney, the Milwaukee Bucks’ defensive coach, providing the Nativity boys basketball team with an inspirational speech before the Nighthawks went on to win the Catholic Athletic Association championship in St. Paul last week. On the Nativity team was David Ek, whose 84-year-old grandfather, David, was captain of a Nativity championship team.
DON’T PRINT THAT
There has been speculation that Richard Pitino’s Gophers men’s basketball team could play Eric Musselman’s Reno-Nevada, which just won the Mountain West regular-season title, in an NCAA tournament game.
It was four years ago that Norwood Teague, Beth Goetz and Mike Ellis signed Pitino, last week named Big Ten men’s basketball coach of the year, at a private residence at the posh Mediterra golf complex in Naples, Fla. Teague, Goetz and Ellis are gone from Minnesota.
The Gophers now are 3-1 against Michigan State in Big Ten tournament history. Minnesota won 76-73 in 1998, lost 59-64 in 2009, won 62-57 in 2010 and 63-58 on Friday.
But the Gophers are 5-28 versus Michigan State since then in regular-season games.
The Twins’ Eddie Rosario hit a single, double and triple Friday night for Puerto Rico in an 11-0 victory over Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic. Jose Berrios, Hector Santiago and Kennys Vargas of the Twins are on the Puerto Rico team.
The inimitable Wayne Hattaway, 77, was sitting inside his sister’s home in Mobile, Ala., last week watching TV soap operas. He decided he couldn’t bear it any longer.
“Got to get active again,” he said. “I can’t do this — I’ll die if I don’t get back to work.”
So after being active as a bat boy, trainer and clubhouse equipment guy for 9,112 professional baseball games — minor league and major league — Hattaway last week changed his mind and decided to return to the Twins clubhouse for one more season. He’ll fly to Minneapolis to join the Twins at Target Field in mid-May.
The Twins’ 103 losses last year drove Hattaway to consider quitting after 54 years in the Twins organization.
“I decided I couldn’t take (the losses) much longer,” he said.
But Hattaway will hang in there for one more season. A living baseball history book, he’ll be a welcome sight when he arrives at Target Field.
By the way, is there a highlight from among those 9,112 games that began with him as a Dodgers minor league batboy in Mobile in 1952?
“The Twins winning the 1987 World Series — I had all those guys in the minor leagues and watched them coming up,” he said.
The Twins in July will bring back players from the 1987 World Series champions — considered the most beloved team in Minnesota sports history — for a 30-year reunion at Target Field.
Ex-Twin Alex Meyer, now of the Angels, walked four, gave up two hits and three earned runs while getting two outs of eight batters he faced in a spring training game against the Cubs last week.
OVERHEARD
Dick Jonckowski on his retirement after 31 years as Gophers men’s basketball public address announcer: “Many of the great names in sports announcing have decided to retire — Vin Scully, Dick Enberg, Brent Musburger, Verne Lundquist, and Chris Berman has cut back duties at ESPN, and Bob Costas apparently may not do any more Olympics — so what the heck, I guess I’m in pretty good company.”
