Have I EVER said that their first three games were impressive?
You may not have said that they were impressive but just a few posts back you were trying to argue that those first three were decent opponents. Vis-a-vis #20 or #15 they might be reasonably decent but vis-a-vis a top-10 team, they aren't.
And comparing wins by point spreads....especially when it gets to multiple touchdowns is a silly activity. I mean....Fleck doesn't on-sides kick against a far inferior opponents that they are already beating by two touchdowns in the first quarter.
To an extent I agree. I'd be willing to give Minnesota a pass on "only" beating Maryland by 42 compared to Ohio State and Penn State beating them by 59. However, I disagree with the exact wording that you used. You said it was silly especially when it gets to multiple touchdowns. There is a major difference between beating a team by 14 and beating a team by 59. A game decided by 14 was generally a pretty competitive game. A game decided by 59 was generally a beatdown.
I agree to the extent that comparing sizes of beatdowns generally doesn't provide much useful information. When comparing beatdowns I generally think that looking at time rather than points is better. Ie, at what point was the game effectively over and Minnesota gets credit for completely controlling the Maryland game. They led 28-0 before halftime and after that it never got closer than 25 points, that is a beatdown.
And when Minnesota puts in their second string....it's not a bunch of four and five star backups.
Ah, that is a part of the point. In this game how good your backups are frequently matters. Injuries happen. Targeting ejections happen. Suspensions happen. Injuries accrue over the course of the season so they tend to be a bigger issue at year end than at the beginning of the year. The fact that Minnesota doesn't have a bunch of four and five star backups isn't an argument in favor of a high ranking for them.
Comparing win spreads against the bottom of the league is a fools errand. Box score analysts like you make laugh. For a second....you almost tricked me into thinking that you actually WATCHED all those games!
Neither I nor anyone else has watched every CFB game played this year. Thus, at some point we can't just use "eye test", we have to go by stats from what we missed. I don't need to watch films of Minnesota's first four games to know that those are not anywhere close to top-10 level performances.
- Top-10 teams don't need a late fourth quarter TD and two point conversion to beat FCS teams by a TD (SoDak St).
- Top-10 teams don't need a late TD to get to OT against middling MWC teams (Fresno).
- Top-10 teams don't need a TD in the last seconds to beat middling Sun Belt teams (GaSo).
- Top-10 teams don't wait until the third quarter to put away bad B1G opponents then let them back in the game by allowing them two fourth quarter TD's (Purdue).
Any one of those things could happen to any top-10 team. Nobody plays their best game every time out. Once in a while Georgia loses to USCe (this year) or Ohio State loses to Purdue (last year) but when you have four games that are clearly WAY below what is expected out of a top-10 team then you probably aren't a top-10 team. Maybe Minnesota has improved so much that they are now and they'll get a chance to prove that with upcoming games against #20 Iowa, #14 Wisconsin, and (potentially) a highly ranked B1GCG opponent but they haven't done enough to erase those four VERY weak performances. One one-score home win over a highly ranked opponent isn't enough in part because like I just said, "nobody plays their best game every time out." That applies to Minnesota but it also applies to their opponents. Maybe Minnesota is a legitimate top-10 team and they just had four really bad games to start the season. Alternatively, maybe they aren't and Penn State just had a really bad game their last time out. I don't know yet and you don't know yet either.
