Minnesota
Analysis: Minnesota United’s strikers are important, but for coach Eric Ramsay, it all comes back to defense
MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS
Striker is soccer’s glamour position. It’s the forwards who score the goals and sell the jerseys, and it takes something pretty special for players at any other position to break through to that level of fan popularity.
Minnesota United played two strikers last week against Seattle, with a three-man midfield behind them. As the Loons travel to San Jose on Saturday to take on the last-place Earthquakes, it’s easy to focus on the glamour up front. It’s just not where the Loons themselves are necessarily focused.
New signing Kelvin Yeboah scored twice against Seattle. Breakout star and leading goal-scorer Tani Oluwaseyi will return from injury. The Loons still have veteran star Teemu Pukki, ready and willing to bang in a few more goals. It’s natural to ask: If they play more often with two forwards, which striker partnership might look the best, score the most and provide the most star power?
It’s instructive, though, that when you ask coach Eric Ramsay about playing with two strikers, he can’t help but end up talking about defense.
“The difficulty sometimes with playing with the two forwards is how you defend, and we’ve made a really big point about making sure that we get real aggression from how the wingbacks defend,” Ramsay said. “We don’t want the wingbacks defending as if they’re fullbacks in a flat back five, and we certainly don’t want them attacking in that way.”
Having three midfielders instead of two seems like it should be more defensive, not less. The positioning of the players, though, means the problem becomes the width of the field.
When the Loons play with three up front, the two widest forwards — Ramsay refers to them as “number 10s,” the designation usually used for attacking midfielders — can naturally drop back on either side to defend on the outside, across the midfield area. This means the wingbacks, whose natural spot on defense would be in a back line of five players, don’t have as much responsibility to bolt out of the back five and defend the opposition’s wide players in midfield.
North Carolina will visit Minnesota to start the season and open the post-Drake Maye era after the departure of the star quarterback to the NFL.
You can watch the game on Fox at 8 p.m. EDT Thursday or live streaming on fubo TV (FREE trial), Sling TV (discount) and DirecTV Stream (FREE trial and discount).
Maye was the third overall pick in the draft. Coach Mack Brown has so far declined to name a starter.
The new centerpiece of the offense is running back Omarion Hampton. He was a preseason All-America pick by The Associated Press and a second-team Associated Press All-American last year. He ranked fifth in the FBS by averaging 115.7 yards rushing per game to go with 15 touchdowns. With Maye gone, he’s the centerpiece of the offense.
The Tar Heels have a prime opportunity for a strong start to the season, with three straight home games against non-power conference opponents followed by a relatively soft ACC slate. This will also serve as an assessment of progress under new defensive coordinator Geoff Collins, the former Temple and Georgia Tech head coach.
Minnesota faces a much tougher schedule in the supersized Big Ten with games against seven of the top 11 teams — and four of the top six — in the league’s preseason media poll, so an opening win against a power conference team would go a long way toward a bounce-back season from a disappointing 6-7 finish in 2023 that only saw the Gophers get to a bowl game because of their academic score. They also have a new defensive coordinator in Corey Hetherman.
Their quarterback is Max Brosmer. The sixth-year transfer from New Hampshire, who led in the FCS in passing yards per game, has wowed coaches and players with his leadership ability, work ethic and arm strength since arriving in the winter. The Georgia native must adjust quickly to Big Ten-level competition.
FILE – Minnesota running back Darius Taylor runs for a touchdown against Bowling Green during the second half of the Quick Lane Bowl NCAA college football game, Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2023, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Al Goldis, File)AP
North Carolina last beat a power conference foe outside the ACC on Sept. 10, 2016, at Illinois.
Meanwhile, Minnesota is 21-2 in nonconference games under P.J. Fleck. The Gophers open the season at home for the 12th straight year and are 10-5 overall in home openers at Huntington Bank Stadium.
O’Connell pointed to Rypien’s familiarity with similar offenses, including time spent last season with the Los Angeles Rams, as well as what he showed during the 2024 preseason with the Bears.
Rypien completed 24 of 34 passes for 335 yards with three touchdowns and a passer rating of 131.4 for Chicago.
“Brett has some exposure to, you know, different variations of our system that will give him a fast-track timeline,” O’Connell said. “And just knowing where he’s at mentally, the type of preseason he had, it gives us a little bit more of a short-term kind of foundational plan for a week from Sunday versus what might be in Jaren Hall’s best interest for what’s best for his career.
Hall, a fifth-round pick in 2023, finished his second NFL preseason having completed 28 of 46 passes for 339 yards with four touchdowns, no interceptions and a passer rating of 112.5.
“I fully believe in Jaren Hall’s future,” O’Connell said. “I believe that we brought Jaren here for a long-term process that, quite honestly, you guys have heard me talk about quarterback journeys a lot. That timeline got sped up when we went through the numbers at the position we did a year ago.
“And all Jaren has done, you know, since that is do all the right things, improve. I thought he was, you know, showing a lot of those things in the preseason action,” O’Connell added. “That move was really indicative of knowing what we went through last year, having the opportunity to have a couple veteran guys behind Sam that give us an opportunity, with comfort in the system.”
2024 Minnesota State Fair. (Madison Hunter/FOX 9) (FOX 9)
FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. (FOX 9) – The Minnesota State Fair set another attendance record for Wednesday at the Great Minnesota Get-Together.
How many people attended on Wednesday?
A total of 145,531 people passed through the gates on Wednesday, Aug. 28, beating the previous record of 144,940 set in 2018, according to the State Fair’s website.
In 2023, more than 1.8 million people attended the Great Minnesota Get-Together. The record for total attendance was set in 2019 when 2,126,551 people attended the fair.
So far, the Minnesota State Fair has recorded just over 980,000 people attending the Great Minnesota Get-Together this year, with several days still to go.
Dig deeper
The fair set back-to-back records to start in 2024, with high attendance on both opening day (138,875 people) and the first Friday (171,233 people).
On Aug. 26, the state fair had its lowest attended Monday and first Sunday since the 1980s, likely due to a mixture of extreme heat and impending storms. Tuesday rebounded slightly, but attendance was still lower than in 2023.
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