The Skolney Blog

Wisconsin 38 Gophers 17 Well, I can't honestly say I am totally surprised. After the win over Penn State put the Gophers into the top 10 with a 9-0 record, basically clinching this as the best Gophers season in decades, there remained a lot of scenarios for more joy. And only one scenario remained in which this season could still be seen as a failure. Guess which scenario played out? I know a wider perspective paints this season as a success. Easy schedule or not, the Gophers don't just win 10 games all the time. They don't beat top 10 teams often. And there was no reason to believe 10 wins were possible when I was at TCF Bank Stadium in September watching this team need basically a miracle to come back to beat Georgia Southern. And this team even now is barely over a year removed from the team was getting trucked weekly by the Illinois and Marlylands.  Don't care. They fucked up ALL the good vibes today. Today permanently tainted, if not ruined, the whole season. What ...

Midway Roland Emmerich can still do grand spectacle like few other directors. And he crafts some really visceral dogfight sequences in this. But he clearly had some serious budget constraints, as this film's Pearl Harbor attack scene looks very cheap, and the film is filled with that awful CGI fire that drives me nuts. Beyond that the script is okay, mostly just standard war movie stuff, albeit performed by a cast full of reliable like Woody Harrelson(who looks exactly like his SNL Joe Biden) and Dennis Quaid. Charlie's Angels Too bad this flopped. I would have gone for another of these. Kristen Stewart is a comedic revelation. Naomi Scott is top 5 gorgeous, with comedic timing to spare. And Ella Balinska is a badass. I wish the movie leaned into the silliness more. It spends an awful lot of time taking itself too seriously.  Last Christmas I could see this settling in as a new Christmas movie to watch yearly. It's not a classic, but they take Emilia Clarke and just set her...

Is there anything funnier than the Packers getting help from the refs all game, yet still getting killed 37-8? Aaron Rodgers barely threw for 100 yards.  Vikings are now tied for first, and control their own destiny to win the division. Win out, you win the north.  Period. 

Vikings bye week, so it was a redzone day. Most of the games were kind of irrelevant, but there were some games that mattered for the Vikings. For sure the Vikings odds of just making the playoffs improved. The Panthers losing to the Saints and the Eagles losing to Seattle further rendered those 2 teams non-factors. Dallas losing probably helps too, but someone's winning the east so only the 2nd place team matters for us. On the other hand those results made moving up in the NFC harder. We could wind up with a 13 win NFC division champ that doesn't even get a bye. The AFC is just a shit show. Buffalo is firmly in one wild card spot, but that 6 seed is totally up for grabs. 4 teams are 6-5, but I think the 5-6 Browns are the favorites to get in with their easy remaining schedule. The last 2 games of the weekend have huge Vikings implications. Hoping for the Packers and Rams to lose. It would put the Vikings in a 1st place tie, and give us a full 2 game lead in the wild card race...

Gophers 38 Northwestern 22 In a week the Gophers play a game with implications bigger than any game in my lifetime. But first they had to get past a terrible Northwestern team. The term "trap game" has become comically overused, but this time it applies. They sure didn't play the first quarter like they were looking past anybody. This thing was 21-0 in a blink. It was a bludgeoning.  And then it wasn't.  Look, I never once felt this game was ever in doubt. And the Wildcats never got it closer than 12 points after that opening burst. But the Gophers played a very poor game the last 3 quarters. The offense never wavered that much. Tanner Morgan threw one awful pick, but they always moved the ball. Problem was so did Northwestern. They even lost their starting QB, but after 21-0 they just kept staying on the field. Now, they don't have players who can make big plays, but those 6 and 7 yard type plays add up too. The Gophers defense really struggled to get off the fie...

Vikings 27 Broncos 23 Did that seriously happen?  By halftime today I had already so fully accepted the loss, that the Vikings had gone into their bye with an absolute turkey of a loss, that the reality that instead they head into the bye having pulled off their biggest comeback win in nearly 30 years still feels like a dream. I cannot believe what I saw. I mean, this team was DONE. The first half they were absolutely catatonic, incompetent, you name it. The defense was being humiliated by something called Brandon Allen, who was dropping dimes all over our decayed secondary. Even their wide receiver pass clowned us. Our offense was basically a spectator. They were never on the field, and when they were they couldn't do anything. Cook was stuffed. OL wasn't blocking. Cousins was a mess. I saw a million comments referencing that Buffalo game last year, but this was worse. This wasn't a bunch of weird plays happening. This was complete and utter domination on all sides.  When ...

Iowa 23 Gophers 19 For the first time in a calendar year the Gophers lost a football game. Kind of saw this one coming. To have that unprecedented hype for that Penn State game, followed by an emotional win, and to then immediately follow that up by going down to Iowa to play a good team in a stadium that the Gophers haven't won in since before a lot of these players were born....you couldn't really devise a more obvious setup for a letdown loss. And this team was dead flat in the first half. The defense was AWFUL. Couldn't stop the run, couldn't stop the pass, couldn't do anything. The offense was a little more functional, but they couldn't run, and could not sustain drives through the air. The fact they went to the locker room down just 20-6 was a miracle. This loss sucks, but keep things in perspective. Every Gopher team in my lifetime winds up losing this game by 30 points. They just get run out of the stadium. They made it a game. They put one in the endzon...

Yes, the majority of the attention and criticism and outrage has been directed at Garrett for his insane, violent outburst last night. And he has been handed an indefinite suspension. He is rightfully the story. But my god, there are an astonishing number of people, including paid commentators, feverishly trying to shift the blame over to Mason Rudolph. They say he is the one who started it. WHAT? The whole thing began when Garrett laid a dirty late hit on Rudolph, pile driving him into the ground in a decided game. Then they tussled for a moment, the kind of after the whistle thing you see in almost every game. Garrett was the instigator at every single step.  It's like these people are in an alternate reality. Absolutely NOTHING Rudolph did justified getting a helmet swung at him like that. Garrett could have literally KILLED him if that had been a more direct hit. I don't think Garrett should ever see an NFL field again, although I know that's not gonna happen. 

In theaters: Parasite From Bong Joon Ho, the director of Snowpiercer. This is a hall of a film. A poor Korean family worms their way into the lives of a rich family. This might sneak onto my top 10 of the year. It's a true original, a film that has genuinely surprising twists in it, and which manages to bounce effortlessly between drama and thriller and comedy.  Jojo Rabbit Another great one, this is Taika Waititi's comedy about a little German kid in WW2 who has Hitler as an imaginary friend. This one is just flat out really, really funny, but it also has a lot of heart and substance too. The kid is really good. Scarlett Johansson is wonderful.  Motherless Brooklyn A shame that Edward Norton's long in the making passion project flopped. It's not amazing. You could chop a half hour off this easily, and the particulars of what the bad guys in the movie are doing escape me. But it has a nice throwback style to it. Norton is great. He assembled a great supporting cast too....

Vikings 28 Cowboys 24 The newest biggest win of the season came against many of this team's biggest buggaboos. Primetime road game against a winning team, and coming off that painful loss in Kansas City. And with the Packers having won again and needing to keep pace. This team looked early like a totally different team than last week, where they basically game planned to lose. They ran, and did so outside. They ran screens, which Cook turned into huge plays. They moved Cousins outside the.pocket. And they rolled down the field for touchdowns on their first 2 drives as if Dallas' defense was barely there. I never really thought this game was heading for a rout anyway, but the Vikings pass defense stepped in and made that a certainty. Basically the last 3 quarters of this game was horrific. It was Leslie Frazier era pass defense. Granted, Dallas did make a few just ridiculous catches, including 2 for scores, but this was disheartening stuff to watch. Wide open receivers constantl...

Gophers 31 Penn State 26 The final minutes of this game were playing out like a well worn script. The exact thing that has happened every single time this Gophers program has had a chance to really do something impressive and meaningful for my whole lifetime, and even a couple decades further back than that, was happening again.  A dazzling first half full of big pass plays and turnovers was about to go to waste. A 12 point lead with under 5 minutes left was about to be erased. It was going to be a total kick in the teeth. We were even going to have the obligatory huge officiating mistake to grumble about, as the Nittany Lions last TD should not have counted due to a delay of game. Now, it was not going to be a program-killer. It wasn't even going to destroy this season. But how often do you get a chance to take down a top 5 team at home? So as Penn State was going right down the field again for the inevitable winning score, every Minnesota sports fan had to be feeling the same dre...

Thank you Chargers! 

Chiefs 26 Vikings 23 The Vikings have many infamous playoff losses that hurt. They have a few others that were essentially playoff games(like week 17 last year). This game doesn't fit either criteria, but excluding them this is about as big a punch to the gut of a loss as I can recall.  Basically the Vikings did all the things you can't do on the road against a good team(which the Chiefs still are even without Mahomes) and get a win. The offense was very hot and cold. Cousins was fine. I'm already annoyed at the resurgence of the Kirk haters and it's just started. He missed a couple throws, sure. But he also led a 4th quarter drive to go take the lead, culminating in a dart to Rudolph. But he will get zero credit for that, and get 100% of the blame for the loss, because people are fucking stupid. The offensive line was bad. They could not open holes for Dalvin, against a run defense that had previously been awful. They didn't protect Kirk. And to make it worse they ...

I actually liked a couple of the movies in this franchise since the consensus high water mark T2. Terminator 3 is a great action flick, and yes I thought Genisys was alright. Only Salvation was a dud in my eyes.  But most people seem to agree the franchise has been bad since T2. So now they have taken the Halloween route, by going back to the best movie in the series, and creating a direct sequel to that film, while basically pretending all other sequels never existed.  And it works. Dark Fate is a really good, crafty reboot/continuation of the franchise. It has great action, and perhaps due to James Cameron coming back to produce and work on the story, it has the heart and gravitas that helped make the first 2 films so iconic. It does adhere to the formula of the first 2. Once again both a terminator and a protector are sent back from the future, this time to find a young woman whose survival is essential to surviving a future war with machines. The whole first act is just a ...