NCAA Football minnesota Golden Gophers

The University of Minnesota's Board of Regents has decided to go dry. The Board acted Wednesday to ban alcohol sales at all its on-campus venues, including the soon-to-open TCF Bank Stadium.

"Acted" might be a bit of stretch, actually. "Reacted" is closer to the truth, as the Minnesota State Legislature recently enacted a law mandating that if some fans would be able to buy alcohol at University sporting events, all fans of legal age had to be allowed to.

That seems like a silly law until you consider that the U of M planned to sell alcohol to people in TCF Bank Stadium's luxury boxes while making it unavailable in the cheap seats. I'm sure the Board had its reasons, but the Legislature stuck up for the little guy for once.

Of course, all this move does is correct a quirk that made the Metrodome (pictured) doubly unique among Big Ten football stadiums.

UPDATE: Play4Brew.com's blog page no longer carries the bio mentioned in this post. A call to the university's Athletic Communications office was referred to the football office. They have yet to return FanHouse's call for comment.

Nowadays, college football coaches are all over the Internet. Minnesota's Tim Brewster is no exception to this.

He has a Web site, is on Facebook, and also posts updates on Twitter. Part of Brewster's online empire is a blog that is regularly updated. On that blog is a bio that talks about Brewster's 20-plus years of coaching football. It is there that Brewster stretches the truth a bit to make himself look like an awfully successful coach.

There's little chance it was anything more than a copy-editing oversight, but by gosh, Minnesota's 2009 spring football media guide happened to leave something out of the record--namely, the 55-0 loss to Iowa which closed the regular season. Granted, there are many reasons the Gophers might like to forget that game, but I've learned never to assume evil when plain old "durrrr" will suffice.

Of course, this is the internet age we're talking about, so naturally the matter has attracted attention. Specifically, it caught the attention of the Cedar Rapids Gazette's Mike Hlas, who notes that he remembers the game quite clearly. Also naturally, Hlas's calling attention to the matter caught the attention of the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Michael Rand, who knows it's all in jest but decides to take a swipe at the perceived one-way nature of the Iowa-Minnesota rivalry.

Read both Hlas's and Rand's posts, and you come to one conclusion.

Every Monday during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Mr. BCS Goes To Washington -- Except I have a feeling Jimmy Stewart would find some way to rail against the BCS, however wrongheadedly. You see, the big word in the halls of Congress on Friday was "fair" but don't let that confuse you. While the Mountain West and certain members of Congress are using the fairness term to stoke public support, their real concern is about money.

It's barely spring here in the Midwest but spring football is well under way, and there's abundant intrigue in the Big Ten conference. Coming off what seems like the 46th consecutive disappointing bowl season, including a Rose Bowl where Penn State's Daryll Clark (right) did his best but the Nittany Lions still couldn't beat Southern Cal, nobody will be expecting much from the conference or its teams when fall rolls around. Somebody has to win it, however, and now is when the jockeying for position really begins.

Wide receiver Eric Decker was a big part of the turnaround for Minnesota last year. The Gophers went from 1-11 to 7-6, and while they did lose their last five games, they were able to gain a bowl bid.

Decker caught 84 passes for over 1,000 yards and seven touchdowns in 2008. While his Gopher teammates take part in spring drills, he's off playing baseball for a Minnesota team that is nationally-ranked and a threat to make the NCAA Tournament. In June, there's a chance Decker will be drafted by a Major League Baseball team, and that could lead to a tough decision for him.

College coaches are always looking for an edge. Since the NCAA put limits on the number of phone calls they can make, coaches started texting athletes to get around the phone call limits.

When the NCAA wised up to that behavior, the coaches were again left to find legal ways to communicate with recruits as much as possible. Enter Twitter, which is growing in popularity among college coaches. One of the latest to discover the benefits of Twitter is Minnesota coach Tim Brewster.

Hey, it's always football season at FanHouse. Welcome to "Greetings From Flyover Country," a new weekly feature that will keep you up to date on Big Ten, Big 12, and MAC football. We'll also cover any Midwestern stories which have national repercussions, along with rounding up the week's arrests and suspensions.

We start this week with a decision bound to have people from San Ysidro to Bangor scratching their heads. Please give a moment's thought to the worst aspect of the last postseason. While the Big 12 championship was settled on the field, the Big 12 South championship wasn't. Instead, the conference gave the division title to Oklahoma, because they use the BCS rankings as a tiebreaker.

It hasn't taken very long, but the University of Minnesota's new on-campus football stadium is taking shape.

TCF Bank Stadium is set to open September 12, as the Gophers host Air Force, an unusually strong non-conference opponent by their standards. The facility is being built near their legendary hockey and basketball facilities, and it will fit in quite nicely.

Minnesota linebacker Sam Maresh has not had many things go his way ever since he decided to play football at Minnesota in 2007. Before Maresh was ever able to step foot on a football field as a Gopher he found out he was going to have to undergo open heart surgery, a procedure doctors told him would end his career before it started.

Maresh didn't listen, and after recovering from the surgery he was on pace to play for the Gophers this year when he was knocked down yet again by a tumor found in his left calf. Well, Sam underwent a biopsy on the tumor over the weekend and he finally got some good news on Monday morning. It's not cancerous. Hell, it's not even a tumor.