Duck Dive: Minnesota Golden Gophers Football 2025 Preview

Special thanks to Max Oelerking of Ski U Pod for joining me on this week’s podcast to discuss Minnesota’s roster:

In many ways Minnesota’s 2024 season was tantalizing for Gophers — in the original, mythical sense of the word — for having made noticeable but not quite sufficient progress on a number of fronts that fans had been demanding of Coach Fleck’s arguably too conservative staff. Last year seemed to confirm that better results had always been available, and perhaps they had the opportunity for an even better season against what turned out to be a remarkably soft schedule if they’d gone farther. There’s always a paradox in evaluating such a staff and making predictions for how they’ll act in the future – should they be commended for getting it right, or condemned for taking so long and implementing half-measures? Will they redouble, or retreat?

What I can add analytically from charting and performing statistical regression on each of Minnesota’s last four seasons is that, unlike a lot of fanbase grousing and surefire armchair diagnoses I’ve encountered over the years, Gophers fans weren’t making this stuff up. Passing efficiency climbed by more than three percentage points over their 2021-23 average and close to eight points over their 2023 season, the blitz and simulated pressure rate nearly doubled in select situations and resulted in a jump in 3^rd & medium/long defensive win rate from mediocre into elite territory, and that in second-order wins my predictive model showed that all five of the Gophers’ losses should have been wins (which isn’t the same thing as saying they should have been 12-0 as each event is probabilistic, still, they blinked a lot).

The new dimension to assessing Fleck’s performance in Minneapolis is the transition away from what was relatively recently a “portal-phobic” identity (a term I not too proudly coined on the podcast) which viewed itself as almost entirely a developmental program that fended off early departures and shunned large-scale portal additions. As Max and I discussed, while last cycle the portal was reserved for taking in a handful of obvious topline players, in the most recent cycle they’ve additionally seen far more of the depth and pipeline pieces take off without yet seeing the field and they’ve much more aggressively used transfers to replace them. It remains to be seen how effectively the staff uses these roster management tools and evaluates players with disparate levels of college experience.

I feel like Gophers fans must be getting whiplash from the experience of watching their quarterbacks over the last decade. For five years they had Tanner Morgan starting, who oscillated from championship-caliber seasons to head-scratching ones and back again, then in his final year was hurt at the end and replaced by Athan Kaliakmanis for the final few games of 2022 and all of 2023 who had a powerful but almost totally out of control arm, and last year the FCS grad transfer Brosmer took over who was accurate and efficient but judicious and perhaps overly cautious. At the same time, as Max pointed out on the podcast, they had wide receivers who were more than good enough to pay off an aerial attack, but a bizarre and unforced collapse in line protection which may have made Brosmer even more quick with the short ball.

So the efficiency vs explosiveness numbers in the passing game take wild swings each year I’ve charted Minnesota, with last year showing an amazing growth by eight points in efficiency but a slide by nearly four in explosiveness as Brosmer had the offense almost crawling down the field with repeated short passes. While their 3^rd & long success rate stayed identically poor at 27%, the Gophers made five to ten percentage point leaps in every other down & distance category, which meant a highly reliable offense advancing the ball as long as they never got too far behind the chains.

Brosmer is out of eligibility and he’d taken virtually every rep during 2024. The returners are a couple of mid 3-stars, #5 QB Lindsey from the 2024 cycle and #14 QB Wittke from 2023 who’d previously transferred in from Virginia Tech. They’ve also taken a low 4-star prep recruit, #12 QB Kollock, and recently got the transfer of a longterm backup who’d been at Boston College and then Old Dominion, Emmett Morehead. Max said that Wittke is more of a running QB and despite his inexperience may well win the backup job. During Spring ball, one of Georgia Tech’s trio of QBs they’d used last year, Zach Pyron, had transferred in but then in a pretty clear sign he’d been beaten for the job, transferred back out to South Alabama.

Max told me that the player who’s done it is Lindsey, and relayed some stories about absorbing lessons from Brosmer and demonstrating leadership on field trips with the wideouts, but that ultimately we have no real idea how he’s going to perform because all of this is happening behind closed doors (Minnesota was quite the innovator in this year’s upsetting nationwide trend in canceling Spring games and hiding away their rosters from the public, last year putting their Spring practices behind a paywall). The only observation I have to make is that none of Fleck’s three OC/QB coaches – Kirk Ciarrocca, Mike Sanford Jr, or Greg Harbaugh (whose name is pronounced differently than and is unrelated to the NFL coaches) — have struck me as making a particularly strong imprint on the quarterback, instead the player himself and surrounding circumstances have been far more controlling. So I think whatever kind of QB that Lindsey is, that’s what Gophers fans are going to get … good, bad, or ugly.

The run game circumstances were somewhat flipped between 2023 and 2024, although the results wound up basically evening out. Two years ago they had stable, quality run blocking from the line but only one back seemed capable of taking advantage of it — #1 RB Taylor, at the time a true freshman – and he only got a chance to play in five games, three at the beginning of the year, one against Iowa midseason, and in the bowl. Taylor was incredibly productive in those games; on 130 meaningful carries he had a 62% success rate on 5.8 adjusted YPC and was one of the very few Big Ten backs getting an above FBS average rate of explosive rushing. Making comparisons to the same defenses or to the entire meaningful data set, the other four backs were far less productive in 2023, underwater in success rate and between 3.2 and 4.4 YPC.

In 2024 three of those unproductive backs departed and the fourth, who was a walk-on pressed into it by Taylor’s injury, essentially had no meaningful carries. The Gophers took three transfers to supplement Taylor, though due to injuries to two of them we really only got to see substantial play out of one, Oklahoma’s Marcus Major. He was a serviceable backup with average numbers, about 50% success and 4.9 YPC, but on about three times as many meaningful carries Taylor’s numbers weren’t much different, constituting a substantial falloff from his per-carry effectiveness compared to his 2023 performance. Max said there were some lingering injury issues with Taylor going into the beginning of Fall which I can say were detectable on film, but we both agreed that Taylor (and for whatever it’s worth, Major, though he’s out of eligibility) are better backs than their 2024 numbers indicate and the real issue is that the line took a nosedive.

Minnesota has again taken a couple of transfers who, by all indications according to Max, will form the entirety of the rotation along with Taylor, though it’s worth noting that it’s clear the staff wants to get off this transfer treadmill because they’ve taken a full prep class this cycle and are working on two more redshirt freshmen to repopulate the room. The two upperclassmen transfers are very interesting – #23 RB C. Davis from Washington, who for several years I’ve been on record as saying looked like the most talented and complete of the Huskies’ backs to me but due to one unfortunate thing or another has never really gotten a full season’s run, and #2 RB Turner from Marshall who I haven’t watched at all but has an eye-popping raw statline of 8.3 YPC on 104 carries last year.

As we discussed on the podcast, this room has several different ways it can go, because each of these three backs is potentially excellent but also has a question mark attached, and because of the recent history of the line’s performance significantly denting even very good backs in this team’s run game and that’s an unresolved matter. For Taylor, we don’t know if he can recapture his freshman magic, and the possibility has to be confronted that it was an artifact of those five games or that he lost something with his injury. For Davis, despite his bluechip talent rating and the promising glimpses of him I’ve seen, never forcing his way onto the field since his 2019 recruitment is a dark cloud. And for Turner, there’s something to prove for someone who’s stepping up to a Power conference, and who didn’t generate more transfer portal attention with what should have been Doak Walker numbers.

Minnesota used a pair of tight ends in 2024, Nick Kallerup and #86 TE Geers. I’d seen both of them on the field as blockers for the last several years of charting but neither was really being used as receiving options since all the targets were instead going to Brevyn Spann-Ford (that is, to the extent the Gophers had any targets for TEs at all; Max and I have discussed how the position seems to be de-emphasized in the passing game recently and I had the statistical engine generate a chart in last year’s preview documenting the back-and-forth). With Spann-Ford’s graduation at the end of 2023 and no other viable tight ends emerging on the roster, I’d surmised that we’d see just Kallerup and Geers again and in mostly blocking roles; Max added that if anyone would step up to some receiving production it’d be Geers but I didn’t think he looked too comfortable doing so at the time.

It turned out we were both right: in 2024 Kallerup remained a blocker and Geers tried his hand receiving but it was at a much lower per-target performance compared to Spann-Ford’s final season: 44% success rate and 6.0 adjusted YPT, down -15 percentage points in efficiency and -2.2 yards in average from his predecessor … and considering the quarterback context, with 2023’s Kaliakmanis launching balls into the Mississippi while 2024’s Brosmer favored the much more TE-friendly short game, the discrepancy probably should have been even worse.

Geers returns for 2025 while Kallerup has graduated. There remain four young tight ends from either the 2023 or 2024 recruiting cycles who’ve never seen the field, plus a Juco who I think first started playing ball in 2018 and somehow still has eligibility but I’ve only ever seen get one target, #44 TE Bierman. Max told me that the Purdue transfer #87 TE Biber is likely to step past all of them and just take Kallerup’s spot on the field next to Geers.

Biber is a challenge to parse. Due to several other players’ injuries over 2022 and 2023 at Purdue, he had multiple chances over two different staffs to see serious time and repeatedly got passed over (the full recounting of the timeline and why I figured the ship had sailed on him is in last year’s preview of the Boilermakers). As predicted, Biber played second-fiddle to Max Klare in West Lafayette in 2024, then when the staff was fired at the end of the year and the roster scattered to the four winds of the Big Ten, Klare wound up at Ohio State and will likely be their starter (to salvage that team’s bizarre series of whiffs in TE recruiting). As discussed in that article, as result of Purdue’s general offensive ineptitude virtually everything was going to Klare, and as such so little was left for Biber that he has too few targets for quality statistical evaluation, though on those small handful he did look pretty good as he caught all but one and for a 1^st down nearly every time. The possibility can’t be dismissed that Biber’s always been (or just recently became) pretty good and the staff at Purdue was just too benighted to see it. Then again, the same condition might be said to afflict Minnesota’s staff regarding their own receiving options, so this is all speculation.

In both of the last two years under OC Harbaugh, 80% of wide receiver targets during meaningful play have gone to the top two guys. The leader has been four-year starter Daniel Jackson, with 56% of targets in 2023 and 52% in 2024, and I’ve always thought he’s been one of the Big Ten’s most underrated and valuable players who’d be a more well known name with more consistent QB play and pass-heavier offense (he signed a UDFA with the Texans and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he winds up having a pretty productive long-term career in the league). In 2023 the second guy with 24% of targets was WMU grad transfer Corey Crooms, then in 2024 with 28% it was Elijah Spencer.

I think Spencer’s gotten a raw deal, and it seems Max does too since we both talked quite a bit about underutilization, potential, the receiving stats, and lost NFL attention that he should have drawn. He came in from Charlotte where he was extremely productive and looked great running routes on tape in 2023, only for Kaliakmanis to constantly miss him. In 2024 with Brosmer’s better accuracy his per-target numbers soared, to a 62.3% success rate and 8.6 adjusted YPT which made him one of the most valuable receivers in the conference … and we both agreed there was a lot more juice to squeeze if the Gophers could or would have pushed the ball farther down the field.

Jackson and Spencer have both graduated (and a 2023 mid 4-star from Georgia but who’s never really seen the field, Tyler Williams, has transferred out; Max seemed frustrated about that but without any tape it’s unclear whether that’s Minnesota chickening out or if he’s a bust and it was appropriate) but another potential star — if they can use him — remains in the corps in #0 WR Brockingon. In 2023 he was another WR along with Spencer who I noted on my tally sheet was running great routes but Kaliakmanis just couldn’t hit, and his 2024 numbers with the more conservative Brosmer are an intriguing 50% success and 8.6 YPT – the profile of a hit-or-miss, but if he hits he’s gone track star. Max hedged when I pressed about Brockington — he called him a guy who’s weekly stat line was one catch for 68 yards — and whether he was more than a one-shot player or if he could be a reliable Jackson- or Spencer-type the lineup could be built around. Max predicted he’ll be in the lineup either way, and I suppose we’ll just wait and see which it is.

The only other returner with some experience is former Penn State transfer and 2022 low 4-star #4 WR Driver. I tried to be polite and spared reading off his per-target numbers to Max on the podcast but let’s just say there’s a reason even the Nittany Lions couldn’t find a spot for him in their WR corps. The remaining returners are a trio of 2023 or 2024 mid 3-stars with basically no playing time — #18 WR Hayes, #15 WR Lanier, and #8 WR Ja. Smith — though as Max noted these were the three who stuck around while three others of about the same age transferred out (Williams plus Kristen Hoskins and TJ McWilliams), so it’s reasonable to infer that they’re the ones in whose development the staff has confidence.

I suspect the lineup will be dominated by the three new transfers: #16 WR Coleman from Nebraska, #13 WR Loya from UCLA, and #11 WR Tracy from Miami of Ohio. In terms of projections, the logic Max and I worked out goes like this: Loya is probably a lock for the inside position, I’ve been writing for years about how much of a standout he is and much better than UCLA has made him look. Tracy is the high floor / low ceiling guy, with two years of quality production with the Redhawks. If every single WR there’s a question about clicks (Brockington, Coleman, Driver I suppose), then and only then would Tracy be crowded out by higher upside guys, but that’s a low probability scenario so it’s very likely he has a spot.

Coleman is the biggest unknown to me. He is by wide margins both the highest rated on paper and the tallest WR in the unit as a mid 4-star and 6’5”, and Max and I agreed that the Gophers have to at least give someone like that a shot because it’s transformative if he hits. In 2023 as a true freshman he was forced into action early due to injuries to other WRs in Lincoln, looked good to me though his numbers were limited by the atrocious QB situation at the time, and then he himself was injured. We hardly saw him in 2024 — in an upcoming podcast with friend of the series TJ Birkel of The Common Fan podcast about Nebraska, I was told that Coleman wasn’t injured in 2024 and he was just crowded out as a young receiver in a very full room — and then he transferred out, and Max said the official channels from Minnesota have been very quiet about where he stands. The range of reasonable possibilities for his 2025 season are very wide, from exceptional production to riding the bench, with virtually no information to make a guess how it’ll play out.

In a sense, Coleman is a synecdoche for the entire Minnesota passing offense. From the outside looking in, we can see all of the necessary elements for a very good, perhaps even elite passing attack: a confident QB, stable playcaller, o-line with a recent history of good protection, talented receivers with plenty of production under their belts. But that’s not the first time I’ve said that about the Gophers – there are huge question marks about all of those elements as well, the last time we saw any of those things in public there was something big to work on, and we have really no idea any of them are going because the program is operating in secrecy mode. I default to skepticism until success has been proven, but they’ve got plenty of chances to prove it.

After completing the first three seasons of this charting project, I was very impressed with the work OL coach Callahan was doing and had initially projected Minnesota’s line as top three in the conference going into 2024, between across-the-board quality technical grades and returning four linemen who had a combined six full seasons of stable starting experience at their respective spots. Then on our Summer podcast Max told me about a cockamamie plan in the works that would a) have the young #65 OL G. Johnson jump several older developmental linemen and be the new starting center, and b) swap around the well established and effective right side of the line in a rotational system with additional players and old starters in new positions.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing at the time as Johnson as a true freshman backup left guard in 2023 couldn’t maintain a block at all and almost single-handedly lost them the Illinois and Wisconsin games, but Max was completely accurate, and indeed it turned out to be even worse in 2024. While the left side stayed stable except for a couple games the starter missed with a relatively manageable injury, blitz pickup effectiveness on my tally sheet across the line fell off a cliff in addition to the expected direct blocking problems up the middle, and the right side was a carousel in which four different guys played both positions (plus some time on the left, to make it really screwy) and the 2023 starter at RG was benched after two games for no apparent reason, resulting in a complete collapse in pass protection and ability to run off that side. This was quite possibly the biggest own-goal I’ve ever witnessed in the history of this preview series.

A complete recounting of the history of the line’s movements appears on the podcast. The upshot for 2025 is that multi-year starters Aireontae Ersery at left tackle, Tyler Cooper at left guard, and Quinn Carroll who was at right tackle for 2022 and 2023 and should have been full time in 2024 have graduated (Ersery was drafted in the 2^nd round by the Texans and Cooper signed a UDFA with the Packers, while I think the 2024 mess cost Carroll some money). Martes Lewis who was the 2023 right guard but bizarrely switched to tackle then demoted to backup has transferred to Northwestern, and Phillip Daniels who came in unexpectedly in the last month to play right tackle has transferred to Ohio State. Johnson returns, as does #78 OG Beers who was the other unexpected addition and took over at right guard for Lewis and then moonlighted at left when Cooper was out for a bit, then went back to the bench along with Lewis during the final month when Cooper returned, Carroll was at RG, and Daniels was at RT.

There are several other returners in the room, the oldest of whom is the redshirt senior #70 OT Nkele who’d transferred in from UTEP last cycle and Max had mentioned as potentially part of the crazy plan last Summer, though he didn’t actually play. Given that neither Nkele nor any of the other older linemen apparently had Callahan’s favor during this time of madness, I think Max is correct this time around to infer that they’re not going to figure into the 2025 plan. Other than Johnson and Beers, the only returner he thinks will be in the mix is the Gophers’ highest rated redshirt freshman, mid 4-star #50 OT N. Roy.

The three experienced transfers who look like they’re going to necessarily be parts of the starting lineup or at least in Fall camp battles are #74 OL Marshall from UCF, #73 OL D. Ray from Kentucky, and #71 OL Tafai from Washington.

Marshall was the left tackle for 2022 Kent State (one of the most curiously significant teams in recent college football history as they opened with Washington, Georgia, and Oklahoma, and since then more than a dozen starters and coaches have dispersed to Power conference squads), then transferred to UCF where he’s started the last two years, splitting time between right tackle and both guard spots. Ray was a backup guard who walked on at Kentucky after initially going to West Virginia, but wound up starting in a dozen games over the last two years as starters Kenneth Horsey in 2023 and Jager Burton in 2024 got hurt. Tafai was the third-string left tackle at UW who wound up taking most of the snaps because the best (or least bad) option of the three was unavailable in Fall camp and then got hurt midseason, and then the guy who won the job initially was maybe the worst tackle I’ve ever seen in my life, though Tafai wasn’t much better.

Max told me that the staff has already moved Johnson off of the center position to left guard, which would at least give somebody else a chance of improving their communications issues. The new center and right guard will probably be the returner Beers and the UK transfer Ray, or vice versa. Marshall looks like the best of the portal haul and I think he gets one of the tackle jobs, so it just comes down to the talented redshirt freshman Roy vs the UW transfer Tafai for the other tackle job. Since I think about half the population of the state of Minnesota would be an improvement over Tafai at the position I’m betting on Roy winning.

They’ve taken four mid 3-star prep recruits plus a redshirt freshman transfer from Purdue of similar talent ratings as Minnesota typically gets, presumably projects for the future. It’s worth noting that nothing appears to be wrong developmentally here at all, either technically or with the pipeline, and both the Northwestern and Ohio State teams look quite happy with their pickups — those squads seem to think Lewis and Daniels are ready to go and have prominent roles in the Wildcat and Buckeye lineups — so this issue appears to be confined to the managerial side. The line requires Beers, Johnson, and Roy to develop, but that hasn’t been an issue for Callahan. Having to rely on a couple of transfer portal starters is far from ideal, but it became nearly inevitable when multiple homegrown starting caliber players bounced as a likely result of last year’s botch job, and frankly it could have been a lot worse.

For the 2024 season Michigan State had hired away Minnesota’s longtime defensive coordinator Joe Rossi, so the Gophers got Corey Hetherman, who was the linebackers coach at Rutgers under Greg Schiano and Joe Harasymiak, to be the DC/LB coach (curiously, Rossi and Hetherman have coached at three of the same schools — Maine, Rutgers, and Minnesota — but never at the same time). Hetherman’s performance in 2024 was good enough to get Miami’s attention, and the Hurricanes have now hired him away. For 2025, Minnesota promoted DB coach Collins to the DC position (while keeping the safeties remit) and promoted Hetherman’s assistant for the linebacker room up to the on-field level, LB coach Soriano-Marin. In addition, the coach of the defensive line for the last two years, Winston DeLattiboudere, was hired by the Arizona Cardinals and he’s been replaced by two position specialists, DT coach Dottin-Carter and DE coach Robbins, though Max said he hasn’t heard much about them and felt they were going to miss DeLattiboudere the most (a former Oregon GA from 2021 who rose up the ranks rapidly).

The upshot of all this coach shuffling is twofold: first, from a structural perspective Minnesota’s defense is nearly identical to the 4-3 under which has morphed into an almost fulltime 4-2-5 that I’ve come to think of as the bog standard Big Ten defense and is being run by all but a handful of teams in the conference, which is why there’s so much in-conference personnel swapping. Second, to the extent that these defenses differ it’s in philosophy and aggression, which was observable going from Rossi’s relative passivity to Hetherman’s significant uptick in early-down sims and late-down blitzes.

So I pressed Max on what he expects from the defensive coaching changeover, and he said while it’s of course highly unlikely they change out of the 4-2-5 anytime soon, it’s an open question whether they continue the more successful path Hetherman charted or if Collins goes back to Rossi’s approach since he spent much more time doing that. I’ll note that just after the 2023 regular season when Rossi departed early for MSU, Collins was the interim playcaller for the bowl game against Bowling Green and I thought he called a very similar game to his old boss.

I thought the defensive line played very well in 2024, and overcame a quite peculiar dip in performance against opponents’ rushing offenses in 2023 that was off-trajectory for their 2021 and 2022 grades and outcomes (I don’t really have a good answer for why that 2023 dip happened, but it looks like a one-off). While they lose a couple of 5^th year seniors who were prominent parts of the defensive end rotation from 2024, Jah Joyner and Danny Striggow, they bring back everybody else who played meaningful roles on last year’s line: #91 DT Eastern, #97 DT Logan-Redding, #46 DE Finnessy, and #0 DE A. Smith, plus backup #1 DE Howard who got a bit of meaningful play as a redshirt freshman.

They’ve added three transfers to the defensive line: from the FCS ranks #16 DT Lawrence and #8 DE Curtis, and Mo Omonode who was in a 3-down front at Purdue but should be a DT in this structure. There are five prep recruits at DL in this cycle, most of whom weren’t on campus for Spring ball and I doubt we’ll see this Fall for playing weight reasons.

While Eastern and Logan-Redding have been very good at tackle and it was quite a coup to bring both of them back, I think it’s also been a real issue that they have effectively no dedicated relief behind them. None of the returners who are tabbed as tackles — redshirt freshmen #55 DT Hicks and #93 DT Sunram, and redshirt sophomore #99 DT Randle — have seen the field even in garbage time, while the somewhat older backups who have, Luther McCoy and Martin Owusu, both transferred out. Last year they solved this problem by having the end Smith slide over and moonlight as a backup tackle, and Max said he thinks they may be able to get that to happen again and/or for Howard to do the same thing in 2025.

The ends are looking at an almost identical situation however, and that group is losing two of its starters, so I’m not sure they can afford to loan anyone out. Again, there are four young returners who haven’t seen the field at all — redshirt freshmen #98 DE Kissayi, #45 DE Macy, and #94 DE Saine, plus redshirt sophomore #11 DE Menz (I think Saine and Hicks might be flip-flopped based on their weights but the counts come out the same) — and the sole older guy who seemed like it was going to be his time to play Hayden Schwartz has transferred out.

What this adds up to is that Minnesota has exactly the eight experienced guys they need for four-man rotations at both tackle and end, but no more. The upside is that three are known, good quantities: prior high quality play out of the two starting tackles Eastern and Logan-Redding and a lot of havoc stats from the end Smith. The downside is that it looks like the developmental pipeline got hit by a Mack truck (I think I bummed Max out on the podcast when I walked through my logic here, I’m not sure he’d considered this) because of who transferred out, the absolute inexperience of the seven young returners who remain, and needing to rely on FCS transfers and a Boilermaker.

Unless Coach Fleck has been hiding a young stud among the returners and not telling anyone about him — a running theme and possibly only half a joke on the podcast — the Gophers need 100% of the four new guys stepping up into the rotation in Howard and the three transfers to work out for this to be complete, and therefore continue their high level of play. Experience tells me that’s not a safe bet under ideal conditions much less significant staff turnover, so I’m expecting a step back here due to fatigue and rotational issues even though I like the starters.

Last year’s preview recounted the unexpected injuries and transfers out of the linebacker room for the 2023 season — particularly Cody Lindenberg, one of the 2022 starters who’d really come on towards the end of the previous year and was a real fan hero but was hurt early in 2023 and didn’t rejoin the lineup until late — which thrust #6 LB Baranowski and #9 LB D. Williams into significant playing time that year, and probably a lot earlier than expected. In 2024 that trio was re-united and played in nearly every game together. That meant pretty limited backup time for anyone else, and it was spread very thin across a pretty packed room with five other guys on scholarship and three more who I believe came in as walk-ons getting to see the field.

Lindenberg was drafted in the 7^th by the Raiders, while Baranowski and Williams return. One of the former walk-on backups who played has graduated, Eli Mau, another of them transferred out to Florida Atlantic with a scholarship offer, Tyler Stolsky, and two young developmental backups on scholarship also transferred out, David Amaliri and Alex Elliott. The most backup play went to 2022 low 3-star #19 LB Gerlach, and Max said he’s going to be in a battle with the only returner I didn’t see, 2024 mid 3-star #48 LB Carrier (meaning Carrier is jumping a couple other guys in the room, redshirt sophomore #49 LB Kingsbury and veteran former walk-on #35 LB LeCaptain).

Max and I saw Baranowski and Williams’ tape over the last two years pretty similarly: the former reads the play pretty pretty well and can get a jump on it if he cracks it pre-snap but there’s an athletic ceiling and he can be late if he doesn’t, while Williams is kind of the opposite with the athletic gifts to catch the play but somewhat frequent misdiagnoses. My experience is that you can’t teach speed but you can teach the position, so I was expecting Max to say that Williams has a spot locked down and Baranowski will be in a battle, but instead he said the reverse. The transfer with whom Williams will apparently fight it out for the other starting spot is Oklahoma State transfer #20 LB Roberson, a longtime backup who finally got the starting job in 2024. I didn’t love his play when charting the Pokes for Oregon’s upcoming game against them, but then I didn’t love anything about that team’s precipitous fall into the abyss last year and it’s entirely possible Roberson is blameless and just needs a change in scenery.

There were quite a few surprises in the defensive backfield in 2024. For one, FCS transfer Jack Henderson, who’d come in to play nickel in 2023 — which is something of a hybrid backer position, it requires a big body in this defense but also a lot of speed — and did fine but not spectacularly that year in my opinion, really stepped up in 2024 and graded out much better, which was one of the most important keys to the Gophers’ improvement in 1^st down and explosive passing defense. For another, injuries played a significant role in shaking up the starters – #12 DB Green missed most of the year with one injury or another, and there was substantial additional playing time created when #14 DB K. Brown (himself a somewhat unexpected starter, as he jumped a much older and more experienced TCU transfer, #24 DB McMillan) missed a game and #7 DB Gousby missed three games, so we saw more of Coleman Bryson and the true freshman and highest rated recruit #3 DB Perich than we probably would have.

Henderson has run out of eligibility, while Bryson transferred to North Carolina (he looks like the only potential starter to have gotten poached; Max seemed a little relieved for the number to be limited to just one, I think he might have been expecting the damage to be worse). As it happens, with Brown, Gousby, Green, McMillan, and Perich all returning for three spots, Minnesota is arguably in a logjam situation even with the departures. McMillan was in a backup role last year and that’ll probably continue, while it’ll probably be Perich sliding over to starting nickel to take Henderson’s spot. I’m not sure where that leaves Green if he’s fully healthy, though I think some competition could be healthy here as there was a major stepdown by about 25 percentage points compared to 2023 in 2^nd & short and 3^rd & short pass defense success when they had Green and 2^nd round draft pick Tyler Nubin both at safety. Perhaps it’ll be solved by more reps for Perich on the offense in the style of Travis Hunter, an amusing story about which Max relayed involving the sale of split-color jerseys.

At cornerback, another returner really stepped up his play during his final season in my opinion, Justin Walley, and he got drafted in the 3^rd by the Colts … though weirdly, opposing offenses didn’t get the memo and threw against him just as often as the other senior starter, former FCS transfer Ethan Robinson, despite a notable difference in performance grades. As both of them are gone and we only saw a bit of backup play for then-redshirt freshman #4 CB Bryan, this unit looks like the biggest question mark on the squad.

There are three 2024 recruits whom Max identified as corners but didn’t see the field, I’m not expecting them to be in the mix (unless the Fleck misinformation campaign has been in operation à la the defensive line): #13 CB Gerald, #15 CB Madu, and #27 CB Seidl. The only other returner besides Bryan is redshirt junior #18 CB Rh. Kelly, and Max said it was getting to be his time to play. There are two transfers into the room, #5 CB Bowden from the FCS and John Nestor from Iowa, both of whom were second-stringers at their previous schools.

I think we know the four guys who’ll make up the rotation and it’s just a point of curiosity which among them will get greater or lesser playing time. The best guess Max had on the podcast seemed like a reasonable inference to me – Bryan is the most likely to be a starter because of his slight edge in prior experience, and because Bowden arrived in time for Spring ball he’s probably ahead while Nestor was a fairly late acquisition. Ultimately losing two senior starters, one of them an early round draft pick, with pretty limited cumulative experience to replace them makes this, as Max called it, the biggest concern for the team. There’s always the hope that there’s a Perich hiding among the freshman, but he had standout talent on paper. For the cornerbacks, the talent ratings are much more comparable to previous guys … who did develop nicely over time, but that took several years of play.