Row the Boat, Again — Can Steady Become More?

Minnesota is good, and has been for a while. The Gophers finished 8–5 (5–4 Big Ten) in 2025 and closed it out by taking the Rate Bowl from New Mexico 20–17 in overtime — the latest turn in P.J. Fleck’s steady tenure: a team that shows up, wins more than it loses, and gets to a bowl. The roster that did it is largely back.

So the question heading into 2026 is a specific one: is good the ceiling, or is there another gear? Because the model, for all Minnesota’s stability, is not sure the leap is coming.

What BBMI’s model says

Here’s the cold read. BBMI grades Minnesota 50th nationally, which slots them 12th out of 18 in the Big Ten — squarely mid-pack. The engine likes the offense a touch more than the defense (SP+ offense in the mid-20s, defense in the high teens), and it does what a model should: it credits what it’s seen on the field, not a program’s reputation or recent record.

The saving grace is the schedule, and Minnesota’s is a genuine gift. The Gophers dodge both Ohio State and Oregon — the two best teams in the league — entirely. The tough games are real: a trip to Indiana (BBMI: ~13% to win), plus Penn State on the road, a visit to Washington, and Michigan at home. But there’s no stretch of true heavyweights, and the back half is stuffed with winnable coin-flips — the kind of games that decide whether a steady program takes a step.

Minnesota dodges Ohio State and Oregon. A soft non-conference and a coin-flip back half put a bowl within reach.

Pick the favorites straight up and it’s 7–5 (4–5 Big Ten) — a bowl team in the base case, though the expected-win math sits right on the six-game line.

Continuity is the whole plan

The story in Minneapolis is that almost nothing changed, and that’s on purpose. Fleck is back for year ten, still rowing the boat, running one of the more stable head-coaching situations in the league. And for the first time since 2022–23, Minnesota gets to run it back with the same starting quarterback two years in a row — no small thing at a program that had cycled arms.

The identity is unchanged too: physical, defense-and-run-game football, ball-control offense, win the field-position battle, win close. It’s not flashy and it never has been, but it’s a formula that has produced a bowl in basically every healthy year Fleck has had. The bet is that continuity compounds — that a returning quarterback, a returning star back, and a veteran-heavy roster add up to more than another 8–5.

Minnesota worked the portal heavily on the defensive line, where a Cal edge and a pair of Marshall tackles headline a trench rebuild. But the defining transaction was a loss — All-America safety Koi Perich, out the door to a College Football Playoff program. More on that below.

P.J. Fleck, year ten

There’s no buyout math or hot-seat drama here. Fleck is entering his tenth season, is well-compensated, is secure, and is the coach the athletic department wants. “Row the Boat” is a beloved mantra or a punchline depending on your zip code, but the results underneath it are hard to argue with: he took over a program that had drifted and built a dependable bowl team that just reclaimed its biggest rivalry trophy.

The one genuine instability is the coordinator carousel. Minnesota keeps building good coaches and then losing them to lateral moves — most recently defensive coordinator Corey Hetherman, who engineered a top-ten national defense and then left for Miami. That churn on the staff, more than anything on the roster, is the soft spot in an otherwise placid picture.

The quarterback question

Here’s the position that decides whether steady becomes special. Drake Lindsey returns as the starter after taking the job as a young passer in 2025 and holding it — he called the decision to come back a “no-brainer.” Behind him, Liberty transfer Michael Merdinger arrives to push the backup competition.

The debate is a good one to have: is a returning, experienced Lindsey an upgrade on the room, or is the ceiling capped? Either way, Minnesota gets to skip the get-to-know-you phase entirely — same arm, same reads, a full offseason of first-team reps banked. In a Big Ten where plenty of teams are breaking in someone new, quarterback continuity is a genuine, underrated edge.

Darius Taylor: the question is just health

Minnesota’s running back room is set. The talent isn’t in doubt — the durability is. Darius Taylor is a legitimately excellent back who has simply never had a fully clean season:

• ›2023 (true freshman): 799 yards in six games before injury
• ›2024: 986 yards and 10 touchdowns over 12 games
• ›2025: 670 yards despite a Week 2 hamstring that cost him the Cal and Rutgers games, plus heavy work as a receiver

That’s roughly 2,450 career rushing yards from a player who’s basically never been at 100% for a full year. Now a senior and an NFL prospect, Taylor has one job in 2026: a healthy season, start to finish. Pair a durable Taylor with a returning quarterback and Minnesota’s ball-control offense has a real spine. It’s the single biggest swing factor on the roster — and, unlike almost everything else about this team, it’s out of the coaching staff’s hands.

The defense: reload, minus a star

The defense has been Minnesota’s backbone, and it took the roster’s hardest hit. Koi Perich — the Esko, Minnesota native who earned second-team All-America honors as a freshman in 2024 and drew comparisons to Derwin James and Kyle Hamilton — entered the portal and committed to Oregon. Losing a homegrown, All-America safety and electric return man to a conference-and-Playoff rival leaves a real hole in the back end, and it’s the kind of departure a stable program rarely has to absorb.

The response was a defensive-line rebuild through the portal: Cal edge T.J. Bush, Marshall tackles Naquan Crowder and Sid Kaba, and FIU’s Xion Chapman, restocking the trenches around the returning pieces. The model’s read on the unit is middle-of-the-road — solid, not scary — which feels right for a group replacing its best player and settling a secondary. If the program does what it usually does and coaches up a functional defense by October, the schedule is soft enough to carry it. If the Perich-sized hole lingers, a couple of those toss-ups tip the wrong way.

The path to a bowl (and then some)

BBMI base case: 7–5 (4–5 Big Ten) — but the underlying win probabilities add up to about 6.0 expected wins, right on the six-win bowl line. Four true toss-ups sit around 50/50 (Mississippi State, Northwestern, UCLA and the finale), and they swing the whole season: win them and 8–4 or better is on the table; lose them and a 5–7 fall with no bowl is very much in play. The base case is postseason football — but a thin margin, not a lock.

The trophy trove: Minnesota’s 2026 is a scavenger hunt

Here’s a fact that makes the Gophers’ fall genuinely fun: Minnesota plays for three different trophies in 2026 — a stranger, richer collection of hardware than almost anyone puts on the line in a single season:

Three rivalry games, three pieces of century-spanning silverware, all in the back half of one schedule. Sweep them and it’s a season Minnesotans tell stories about.

The model’s single closest game of the season

The Axe is the closest game on Minnesota’s entire schedule — 53% to the Gophers, a near-perfect pick’em. And there’s a mountain of history behind it:

• ›It’s the most-played rivalry in FBS, full stop — 135 meetings — and the longest continuously played series in the sport (119 straight — every year since 1907).
• ›The trophy dates to 1948, born when the previous prize, the Slab of Bacon, vanished after the 1943 game. Paul Bunyan’s Axe is a six-foot handle engraved with the score of every game — a running ledger of the rivalry you can hold in your hands.
• ›Minnesota leads the all-time series 64–63–8 and comes in on a two-game winning streak. The Axe currently lives in Minneapolis.

In the base projection, it stays there — BBMI gives Minnesota the razor-thin edge to make it three straight. But “the closest game of the season,” on the road, in a rivalry this old, is exactly the night that laughs at projections.

BBMI is rolling out college football coverage as the season approaches, and the Gophers are one of the first teams up. Model ratings are preseason and update as real games are played.