P.J. Fleck’s 10th season at Minnesota has come with plenty of noise around his record against Iowa, and that storyline finally got a hard reset on Saturday. The Gophers beat the Hawkeyes 13-10 at home to reclaim Floyd of Rosedale for the first time since 2014, and while the game was messy all afternoon, the result is what will stick.
Iowa did what Iowa usually does under Kirk Ferentz: it played a mistake-free brand of football. But this time, the Hawkeyes gave Minnesota three first-half turnovers to work with, and the Gophers could only turn that into three points.
That left a huge opening on the table. Then came two more Iowa turnovers in the second half, and Minnesota again failed to cash in.
By the end, it felt like a game that had slipped through the Gophers’ fingers a few times over.
And yet they still walked away with the trophy.
There were plenty of stretches when things seemed close to falling apart for Minnesota. Some of those moments really did wobble.
The offense had a rough first half, Drake Lindsey looked lost, and the run game never found a rhythm early on. But Fleck stayed with his approach and trusted the group in front of him, and that ultimately held up.
That is the kind of win Fleck has spent years talking about building. The Gophers didn’t look sharp, and they certainly didn’t make it easy on themselves. Still, they fought through the ugly parts and came out with a rivalry victory that had been a long time coming.
For Minnesota fans, that part matters, especially in a rivalry that has so often seemed to tilt Iowa’s way through calls, bounces and breaks. On Saturday, the Gophers got the favorable side of the history for once. It wasn’t pretty, but it counted all the same.
In an era when college football feels more chaotic than ever, Minnesota now holds three rivalry trophies at once: the Little Brown Jug, Paul Bunyan’s Axe and Floyd of Rosedale. That’s the kind of haul Fleck can point to and feel good about, no matter how bumpy the road looked getting there.
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