MINNEAPOLIS — Max Brosmer passed for 271 yards and two touchdowns in just three quarters on Saturday as Minnesota routed FCS opponent Rhode Island 48-0.

Brosmer, a graduate transfer who led the FCS in passing yards per game last year at New Hampshire, completed 24 of 30 passes and helped the Golden Gophers (1-1) dominate the time of possession by a 2-to-1 margin.

“It’s been a fun process so far and I can’t wait to see where it’s going to go with this team,” said Brosmer, who has been on campus practicing with the team since January.

Leaning so much on the passing attack might seem like an outlier for the Gophers, who have traditionally featured a run-heavy offense under head coach P.J. Fleck. But this could be a sign of things to come.

“We want to get to a point where we can throw it to run it. And that’s what you saw,” Fleck said. “You can only do that if you’re consistent, you’re accurate, you’re efficient. Plus there’s three drops in there. They were easy drops. So that’s 27 of 30. That’s throwing it to run it. We have to be more of that and create the balance this team needs.”

Darius Taylor, Minnesota’s leading rusher last year who sat out the season opener with an injury, rushed for 64 yards and a touchdown and caught four passes for 48 yards.

Minnesota’s defense held the Rams to 135 total yards and forced four turnovers. Sophomore quarterback Devin Farrell passed for just 76 yards for Rhode Island (1-1), which defeated Holy Cross 20-17 in its opener but hasn’t forced a turnover in two games.

“Takeaways is a huge piece of the game and we were unable to do it. But I was really proud of the defense for just keeping us in the game for as long as they could,” said Rhode Island coach Jim Fleming, whose team trailed just 3-0 after a quarter.

The Gophers took control of the game when Brosmer led them on two long scoring drives that chewed up nearly 15 minutes and kept the Rams offense off the field for most of the second quarter.

Minnesota went up-tempo starting the second quarter and Brosmer hit his stride, completing five of six passes — with one drop — to get the Gophers inside the Rhode Island 5-yard line. From there, the ground game took over, with Taylor bulling his way into the end zone from a yard out to put Minnesota on top 10-0 with 11:05 to play in the first half.

Farrell returned after sitting out one drive and moved the ball to midfield, but a deep shot intended for Shawn Harris was intercepted by Aidan Gousby at the Minnesota 15.

Brosmer then orchestrated a 14-play, 85-yard march that lasted nearly eight minutes, ending on a Marcus Major 2-yard touchdown run.

The second half started in the same fashion, with Minnesota taking the opening kickoff and driving 73 yards in 12 plays. Brosmer capped it with his first touchdown pass with the Gophers, a 6-yard strike to Cristian Driver that gave them a 24-0 lead.

That cushion expanded to 31-0 on Brosmer’s final pass of the day, a 29-yard touchdown pass on a fade route to Le’Meke Brockington.

The Gophers defense even got on the board when safety Jack Henderson returned an interception 25 yards for a touchdown early in the fourth.

“I think as a team today we were able to play fast and play how we wanted to,” Henderson said.

New Hampshire: Not much positive to take away from this one, though a return to FCS competition will be welcome.

Minnesota: Brosmer looked like a big-time quarterback, though it was against an FCS opponent. Will he be able to do the same when the schedule steps up in class?

New Hampshire: Hosts Campbell on Saturday night in the CAA opener for both teams.

Minnesota: Hosts Nevada on Saturday afternoon. It’s the Gophers’ nonconference finale before a home game with Iowa kicks off the Big Ten slate a week later.

J.H. Snider is the editor of The Rhode Island State Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse.

Many have correctly said that Donald Trump has weird obsessions with crowd sizes and other matters. Well, Rhode Island government has a weird obsession with constitutional convention costs, albeit one that merely mimics the talking points of convention opponents who oppose a “yes” vote on Rhode Island’s Nov. 5 referendum on whether to call a convention.

Experts who do serious public policy analysis usually try to explicitly balance the potential benefits and costs of a proposed policy. But that’s not how Rhode Island’s legislature, via its appointed and constitutionally mandated “preparatory commission,” has framed the problem. The same goes for the secretary of state, who is responsible for summarizing the convention referendum in a voter handbook mailed at taxpayer expense to all registered voters.

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In their 2004 and 2014 reports to Rhode Island’s people, the last two preparatory commissions quantified the potential costs but not benefits of a convention. Rhode Island’s secretary of state then mimicked that type of biased analysis in his ballot summary mailed to all Rhode Island voters.

The government’s cost findings were then ubiquitously cited in the media and, most influentially, cited in the “no” side’s pervasive advertising in the weeks before the referendum. The message was: if a convention has only costs and risks, only a fool would vote for one. 

I don’t object to the government’s attempt to quantify a convention’s potential costs if it makes a similar attempt to quantify its potential benefits. For example, the state’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year, excluding local government, is $14 billion, which translates to $140 billion over the 10-year budgeting cycle between convention calls. This should raise the question: what is a convention’s break-even point if it reduces government waste? For example, how much waste could a truly independent inspector general eliminate?  (The legislature has repeatedly refused to create such an inspector general.)

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Using the current preparatory commission’s heroic assumptions to arrive at a top $4.8 million cost for a convention, that would imply a convention break-even cost of just .000034%. Thus, if a convention’s efforts at improving democratic accountability reduced government waste by just .1%/year, that would result in a 292 times (29,200%) return on investment. And this, mind you, when the Gallup poll has found that Americans think their state governments waste 42% of every dollar spent.

So what’s the strategy used to justify discounting a convention’s potential benefits? The primary one is the claim that the legislature can do everything a convention can without those costs. But this is a bald-faced distortion of both the convention’s democratic design and purpose since Massachusetts pioneered the first convention in 1779. This convention featured independently elected convention delegates to propose constitutional changes followed by popular ratification because the people recognized their legislature would have a blatant conflict of interest designing its own powers and those of competing branches of government. This argument was so compelling that Congress soon mandated conventions for all new states.

Even in the current era of constitutional amendment rather than inauguration, the convention process remains, in most states, the legal gold standard for constitutional change-making. To take the extreme example, New Hampshire, which had 10 unlimited conventions during the 20th century, wouldn’t even allow the legislature to propose constitutional amendments until 1964. U.S. states have held 236 conventions.

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As evidenced by a 2023 University of Rhode Island poll that found only 10% of Rhode Islanders had a lot or great deal of trust in the state legislature, there remains a compelling reason for this institution, which, like the popular initiative available in 24 states, prevents the legislature from having monopoly power over constitutional change proposals. The preparatory commission’s just-released 2024 report has once again studiously ignored this legislature bypass purpose of a convention.

So the legislature’s taxpayer-funded obsession with a constitution’s cost should be called out as not only weird but biased to preserve its power at the people’s expense.