Buck Bravo

Just about every site that covers Gopher football has discussed the news that USC and Minnesota will be facing each other in 2010 and 2011. Whether it be The Star Tribune, The Daily Gopher, The Gopher Hole, Conquest Chronicles, or The Trojan Empire there is plenty of insight and commentary out there. Although completely irrelevant, press photos illustrate that USC and Minnesota have very similar colors. So how will you be able to distinguish USC fans from Gopher fans? Well, it turns out that while USC’s official colors are cardinal and gold and Minnesota’s official colors are maroon and gold, neither team actually wears those exact colors. Though a meaningless endeavor, I researched the standard internet “Hex” color codes for both schools. The following picture should clarify the differences between cardinal, maroon, gold, USC cardinal, Minnesota maroon, USC gold, and Minnesota gold:

If you can memorize the different hues in the above picture, you’ll be able to tell USC fans from Minnesota fans a year and a half from now. By the way, Buck Bravo maroon and Buck Bravo gold aren’t even close to any of these.

I have to send in my laptop to have the screen maintenanced, so I may not make another post for a few days.

Following is the first guest article that I’ve posted.  If you’d like to post a guest article, click here for more details.  I’ll be back on Tuesday morning with my official reaction to the Michigan game.  For now, enjoy this article by “The Gray Haired Gopher”:

Minnesota Football Gopher Sorrows

by The Gray Haired Gopher

The gopher must come out of the hole. No more Minnesota nice, and no more acceptance of losing to “elite” teams. Michigan cannot continue to come into the gopher nation and win football games. The Little Brown Jug was last in a Minnesota trophy case in 2005 (won in Michigan), and before that 1986. How many trips to the doom dome have we made, pilgrims going to suffer the agony of defeat, rather than fans experiencing the thrill of victory. We are nice people, we don’t deserve this do we? Is it our mission to be the fodder for other programs to feast on?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Tim Brewster is doing a magnificent job in a Lou Holtzian way. Keep building the program coach and stay here for a while at least. We begin to get on board with wins, and in fact, we will overload the band wagon with a few more. The ferocious timberwolf hasn’t helped our professional basketball team here, so we can keep the sequestered lovable gopher. Just let it out of it’s hole! In the new TCF stadium, the gopher will have a home again and will be let loose at last!

The above was written this morning before today’s game with Michigan. Maybe it was the gloomy weather, or just the accumulated years of punishment, like an old boxer after too many punches to the head, that gave me the premonition of the impending loss today. The loss last week to Northwestern, in fact a much better played game for the gophers and one they really could have won, added to today’s miserable loss adds up to a prediction of a 7-5 season as I see it. A big improvement from last year, but still the suffering in the doom dome continues and will continue with Iowa in two weeks before ending forever.

Iowa just upset Penn State and will roll in here to finish us off and get a better bowl than Minnesota. Minnesota, with no effective offense in the past few games, seems to have little chance to beat the odds next week in Madison. Thank you gophers for getting to seven wins and for honoring yet another time the school Ski-U-Mah motto, which translated literally actually means “wait until next year”!

Jeremy and Jeff Around at the Golden Gopher Football Blog have been posting great weekly podcasts on their site.  For the most recent 11/6/2008 Michigan preview podcast they called me up for a guest interview.  Check it out at their site by clicking here.

If anyone would like to try their hand at blogging, on occasion I’d like to start publishing guest blog entries.  A few guidelines:

1. Cite all of your sources.  I don’t want to be sued for plagiarism.
2. Send me the blog entry either as email text or as a Microsoft Word document.
3. Include any links to other websites and URLs to YouTube videos.  Wordpress will only allow YouTube videos to be embedded.  Until I move to another host (probably in the off-season) that is the only limitation for entries.
4. Include your name so that I can give you credit.
5. Please be professional.
6. I’ll edit the grammar and HTML links, but I won’t alter the crux of the article.
7. As a blogger, there are no expectations for my site to have the same level of neutrality as official reporters.  I’ll tend to favor articles that are positive regarding the Gopher Football Program.

If I decide to publish your submission, I’ll let you know by email.  Send entries to my email:

BuckBravo24 AT hotmail DOT com.

I look forward to some interesting articles.