New Head Coach Tim Brewster, photograph by Alicia Jerome, courtesy of University Athletics

Football Gopher seniors expect to make history—again.

By Cynthia Scott

Here’s a secret about the 2007 football Gophers: Even though the first game won’t be played until September 1, the season is already under way. In fact, you could say it began in 1959. That year, the Gophers finished last in the Big Ten—which is nothing to crow about—unless, as the Gophers did, you rise up the following year to win the national championship and earn a trip to the Rose Bowl.

New head coach Tim Brewster, who relentlessly invokes Minnesota football history, has set the 1959–60 Gophers squarely before his team as a vision of what’s possible. And central to making it happen is the squad’s 15 seniors, to whom Brewster laid down a promise and a challenge: We will not go through a rebuilding; we will win, and we will win this season—but you have to take us there. It’s a challenge the seniors welcome.

“I don’t know if there’s a player on the team who knew that in 1959 we were dead last in the Big Ten and then in 1960 we won the national championship. We’d all seen the 1960 championship banner, but nobody knew about the year before. Nobody really cared about the year before,” says Mike Sherels (B.A. ’07), a senior co-captain for the Gophers who began graduate studies in sports management this summer.

But Brewster convinced them to care by inviting members of the 1959–60 team—Coach Murray Warmath, along with players Judge Dickson (B.A. ’62, J.D. ’65), Bobby Bell, and Carl Eller—to talk to his team about what it took to become winners. “When he brought in all the former Gophers and we heard their story from 1959–60 and heard about the attitude change they described, that’s something a lot of us recognized,” Sherels says. “They had a lot of detractors on the team, but they brought in a new freshman class and the seniors took control and said, OK, this is what we’re going to do, and they turned it around. A lot of the changes that they described are exactly what we’re going for, so it was uplifting. Very uplifting.”

The Gophers didn’t finish in last place in 2006—they ended up tied for sixth place—but they did suffer a crushing loss in the Insight Bowl to end the season, giving up a 31-point lead and losing 44–41 in overtime to Texas Tech. The memory of that loss still stings, and it’s just one more reason that no one wanted to endure rebuilding—which is sports-speak for “expect to lose.” “Every day in practice we say ‘Rose Bowl, Big Ten champs!’ Coach Brewster leads it, and he says it like he means it,” says senior co-captain Tony Brinkhaus (B.A. ’07). “As a senior, that’s the best thing that could happen to me. To hear him say it was a relief.”

Brinkhaus, a communications studies graduate, admits he didn’t fully embrace Brewster’s lofty vision right away. “For me, personally, there was some skepticism at first, because I was so close to my old coaching staff and I wasn’t sure how things were going to be,” he says. “You can’t really tell what a coach is going to be like until you’re with him on the field. But as spring ball went on, I’d say I gained more respect for him each day.” Part of what sold Brinkhaus on Brewster’s approach was his authenticity.

“When Coach Brewster starts talking about football you can see him start giving you the look,” Brinkhaus says. “He’ll grind his teeth and you can see he really believes what he’s saying. I remember from the first meeting, he was up there in front of us, and he had this powerful look on his face, and he was grinding his teeth and I was like, ‘Wow, this guy is intense.’?”

Brewster’s intensity has been contagious. “It’s been a complete, 180-degree turnaround,” Sherels says. “The intensity during workouts, everyone is gung ho. Usually in every other season, you had your core group of guys, but you also had some detractors who didn’t quite buy into it, naysayers who try to bring people down. All that is gone. There’s not a negative face in the locker room any more.”

“People always say you go through a transition, but I really think that we’ve gone through the transition,” says senior linebacker John Shevlin (B.A. ’07), a sports management graduate student. “Coach Brewster really hit the ground running. I think we went through our transition the first

Steve Davis, photograph by Alicia Jerome, courtesy of University Athletics

couple of weeks of spring ball. It just felt right; it was right. He’s really instilled a level of confidence that is going to carry us a long way.”

How far will it carry? A couple of weeks after Brewster was named head coach, the seniors got together and made a list of what they want to accomplish this year and what it will take to get there. Then they met with Brewster and compared his goals with theirs. The result was the slogan they keep before them daily: Make History Again. Rise up from the bottom of the heap to be great.

It’s exactly what the seniors expect to do.    

True Believer

How a guy from New Jersey plans to revive Gopher football.

By Peter Schilling Jr.

Tim Brewster wants you to be anxious. He wants every Minnesotan from International Falls to Austin to wake up Saturday mornings during football season with butterflies in their stomachs. “I want people to understand that the Golden Gophers are not just the University . . . we’re the state of Minnesota. I want the people of Minnesota to own this team!” the new coach says, not boastfully, but with the same steely conviction that makes his ambitious goal of bringing the Big Ten title back to the U seem utterly reasonable and expected.

Brewster, a veteran Big Ten player himself who became the Gophers head coach this past January, has broad shoulders and an intense look that quickly softens into a likeable grin. A former football player with Pasadena City College and later the University of Illinois, Brewster’s a man consumed by the game. “All my life football has been a strong presence, and the Big Ten in particular. Ever since I was at Illinois over 20 years ago, I’ve been a Big Ten fan. I understand the Big Ten very, very well.”

The 46-year-old hails from Phillipsburg, New Jersey, in the far west of the state on the Pennsylvania border. Brewster says the city shuts down every Friday night in the fall to cheer on the Phillipsburg State Liners, his old high school football team. Their rivalry with the city of Easton is so storied that they were the first high school teams to have games broadcast on ESPN. Later, Brewster played tight end for Pasadena City Junior College and then was recruited to play at Illinois, captaining the team in its 1984 Rose Bowl appearance.

Brewster wasn’t drafted to play professional football, but he tried out with the New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, and Indianapolis Colts before eventually being cut. After stints coaching high school and concluding that he could take his coaching career further, he drove from Lafayette, Indiana, where he was head coach at Central Catholic High, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and convinced University of North Carolina coach Mack Brown to take him as an unpaid assistant. He ended up joining the UNC staff for eight years. When Brown became head coach at the University of Texas, he took Brewster with him; Brewster was tight ends coach at Texas for three years before moving on to the NFL as assistant head coach/tight ends coach with the San Diego Chargers.  Four years later he became the tight ends coach with the Denver Broncos, which is where he was when Gopher athletics director Joel Maturi came knocking last winter.

It’s not hard to understand what convinced Brown to hire Brewster. His enthusiasm for the game is contagious and he envelops himself in research—whether it’s a complex offensive strategy or the past glories of the U. He’s had to wrestle with the naysayers who don’t believe the Gophers have a chance this year, and one way he has addressed the cynics has been to delve into past glories. Already, Brewster possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Gopher football history. When asked about how realistic his pledge to take his team to the Rose Bowl is, he snaps back, “Our goal each and every day is to win a Big Ten title, to bring the championship back to the Gopher Nation. Now, when the Gophers were dead last in 1959, coach Murray Warmath didn’t predict a 1960 national championship and Rose Bowl berth, but that’s what he got.”

Brewster and his staff work around the clock, seven days a week, to develop relationships with their student athletes, with communities throughout the state, even with the U student body. “To build this

Justin Kucek, photograph by Eric Miller, courtesy of University Athletics

program, I believe that you have to start right here, in this state. My staff and I have to reach out to coaches and build trust. We’ve been to 392 high schools around the state, developing a presence with the students and their coaches. The championship begins here, at home.”

Brewster seeks motivated, self-sufficient students who will devote themselves to being both students and athletes. “We demand—we don’t ask, we demand—that the students go to class. That’s obviously the first step. But the secret to successfully implementing this is not just creating a better environment for student athletes, but to look for athletes who embody this belief. Part of that involves selling the University not just as a football school but as an outstanding academic institution.”

A student in any field would do well to emulate Brewster’s commitment. He admits to being not much of a sleeper, waking up every morning with the day’s plan of attack at the front of his mind. Around 4 a.m. he jogs or hits the StairMaster, and then makes his way to the office, where his work really begins.

“I’m not a downtime type of guy and I’ll tell you why. I love my job—my ‘downtime’ is the time spent working on this program,” Brewster explains. “Now, I love to laugh and play golf and run, too, and I’m definitely a people person, but being a coach embodies all of that.” His work is certainly cut out for him, as it would be for a coach at any Big Ten school. But Tim Brewster appears to have had an infusion of Golden Gopher blood and looks to make this a memorable first year.

“This is a great school, absolutely one of the best in the nation, with a beautiful campus and a new stadium on the way. There should be a tremendous connection between the football program and the student body,” he says. Brewster hopes that, as at other Big Ten schools, the students will be the “twelfth man” that gives the Gophers an invincible home-field advantage. “My challenge is to get all 54,000 students out the door and into the Metrodome.” Like every other challenge he’s taken up since January, it’s one Brewster relishes.

Gopher Game Plan

This year’s Golden Gophers stand to benefit from an aggressive new approach that is the cornerstone of Tim Brewster’s philosophy. “I am extremely aggressive, and I want an aggressive offense and an aggressive defense. We want to use the whole field,” he says.

In his hunt for new recruits, Brewster and his staff went after speed and intelligence. They hope to put a team on the field that has not just a quick offense that utilizes both a swift running game and a complex pass approach, but also a swarming defense. Brewster plans to alter the power running game that former coach Glen Mason relied upon to open up the field and allow a more balanced attack toward the end zone. With a coaching staff who cut their teeth at such disparate environments as Northwestern University and the NFL Tennessee Titans, he is looking to broaden the players’ minds with a new, unconventional 4–3 defense that will hit opponents when they least expect it.

Brewster believes that Mason built a solid foundation for a team that has its sights set solidly on the Rose Bowl. He admits that some of the players from that program don’t fit his profile—regarding their speed, especially—and so is suiting the program to fit the team as it exists today. For instance, the Gophers don’t have the receivers Brewster would like on his ideal offense. Confidence and intelligence perhaps are the greatest assets that Tim Brewster will bring to this year’s Golden Gophers. Psychologically, a new staff, new helmets, even new music from the marching band, will have a profound effect on these athletes.

—Peter Schilling Jr.

The Mystery Quarterback

And other players to watch

By Sheila Mulrooney Eldred

One of Mike Dunbar’s first tasks as the new Gophers offensive coordinator was to quell rumors about who will replace three-year starter Bryan Cupito (B.A. ’06) at quarterback. He even joked that perhaps the Gophers simply wouldn’t have a quarterback. In all seriousness, he says the decision between top contenders Adam Weber and Tony Mortenson may come down to the final days before the season opener against Bowling

Steve Shidell, photograph by Eric Miller, courtesy of University Athletics

Green. “Both are good students of the game, very hard workers—and they’re both talented.” Throw a few other long shots into the mix, including Coach Tim Brewster’s son, Clint, an incoming freshman, and it’s clear that the quarterback-to-be may capture most of the initial attention. But here are a few other football Gophers figure to make a difference in 2007:

On Offense

Center Tony Brinkhaus (B.A. ’07) is one of six returning starters on offense. Brinkhaus is a Gophers “mainstay,” says Dunbar. Indeed, he got his first start as a freshman; now, as a senior, he’s started 25 of the 35 games he’s played in. He’s made a good first impression on Brewster, who calls him “an outstanding leader.”

Wide receiver Ernie Wheelwright is the team’s most experienced receiver. Despite scoring five touchdowns in 12 starts last season, Wheelwright did not meet expectations. That’ll have to change, Brewster says. “It’s time for him to step up and help the team win,” he says. “We’re extremely limited at receiver, and I have concerns about being a spread offense. So I’ll ask him to be better than ever right now. He has the ability—it’s up to him to make the decision on each and every down.”

Running back Amir Pinnix will be expected to carry the load in the running game. He rushed for 1,272 yards last year, but with Brewster at the helm, the Gophers will occasionally throw to him as well. He has proven running ability—the only question is how well he will adapt to the new offense, Dunbar says.

Tight end Jack Simmons caught Dunbar’s attention in spring season. He has nine starts under his belt, and while Brewster’s not doling out starting positions just yet, Simmons just might be the one to patch the gaps at tight end left by Matt Spaeth and Logan Payne, who are now with NFL teams.

Outside tackle Steve Shidell, despite coming off an injury, made an instant impression on Brewster, who says he “loves the guy,” especially his vocal leadership.

On Defense

Defensive end Willie VanDeSteeg leads the team with 17.5 tackles for loss and last year came up with 10 sacks. “We’ll lean on him,” says Brewster.

Linebackers John Shevlin (B.A. ’07) and Mike Sherels (B.A. ’07) are the “heart and soul of the defense,” says Brewster. Sherels, the defensive signal caller, started as a walk-on and became a leader. “He earned his way to the starting lineup by overcoming a lot of adversity,” says defensive coordinator Everett Withers. And he calls Shevlin “a hard-nosed run-stopper.”

Cornerback Dominic Jones is a fast, aggressive cornerback who seems to mesh well with Brewster’s style. “I look for dynamic athletes,” Brewster says. “We don’t have enough of them, but he is one.” In addition, he has a sharp mind, Withers adds.

Linebacker Steve Davis switched from defensive end to linebacker, where Withers says he’ll be able to employ more of his athleticism.

On Special Teams

Punter Justin Kucek averaged punts of 40.3 yards last year. It’s hard to evaluate a punter during indoor spring season, but special teams coach John Butler has high hopes for Kucek.

Brewster has a single goal for every player, regardless of their position on the field: “We’re going to play every snap like our hair’s on fire,” he says.

Stadium Update

Since late spring, drivers and pedestrians traveling Oak Street, University Avenue, Sixth Street, and 23rd Avenue Southeast have been hopscotching around detours, lane shifts, concrete barriers, and ubiquitous blaze orange cones as construction workers reconfigure the thoroughfares around the on-campus Gopher football stadium site. On July 1, the 3,000-space Huron Boulevard surface parking lot, where the new TCF Bank Stadium will be situated, was closed, and construction on the actual stadium will begin later in July.

On the fundraising front, $60 million of the U’s $86 million commitment has been raised to date through large donations. The final phase of fund-raising, the grassroots effort, will begin in spring 2008.

—Cynthia Scott