It was supposed to be better than this.

The Gophers football team had four straight home games to start the 2024 season — a first since 1987 — and all four were winnable.

Instead, Minnesota sits at 2-2, 0-1 in Big Ten play, heading into arguably its toughest game of the season: at 12th-ranked Michigan in the Little Brown Jug game at 11 a.m. Saturday in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The Gophers roster is filled with veterans who should have raised their record to at least 3-1, if not 4-0, at the one-third mark of the season. Among the top 15 players in snap counts on offense and defense, a total of 14 are in either their last year of eligibility or are expected to be NFL Draft picks next spring.

On offense, that includes starting quarterback Max Brosmer, top two wideouts Daniel Jackson and Elijah Spencer and the team’s best three linemen in Aireontae Ersery, Tyler Cooper and Quinn Carroll.

On defense, that elder group includes its top two defensive ends in Jah Joyner and Danny Striggow, its clear-cut best linebacker in Cody Lindenberg and a trio of its foremost defensive backs in Justin Walley, Jack Henderson and Ethan Robinson.

Going into the season, eighth-year head coach P.J. Fleck rightfully touted how all eligible returning starters were, in fact, coming back (besides quarterback Athan Kaliakmanis). This was an offseason victory for the U and its name, image and likeness (NIL) collective, Dinkytown Athletes.

But that group — including what might be the Gophers’ deepest draft class ever — has not produced enough fruit through four games, and the depth of Fleck’s team still has holes.

Given Las Vegas’ over/under win total set for the U at 5 1/2 wins, victories through this point in September appear crucial to reach bowl eligibility with six wins come December.

This is most concerning along the offensive and defensive lines, which were widely viewed in preseason the team’s best two positions groups. But the U’s inability to run the ball on offense or consistently stop it on defense are why they lost to North Carolina 19-17 in the season opener and fell 31-14 to rival Iowa last Saturday.

The right side of the U offensive line rotated from veteran Martes Lewis to redshirt sophomore Ashton Beers at guard and sophomore center Greg Johnson is still getting his bearings at a new position. Meanwhile, the interior of the U defensive line misses departed tackle Kyler Baugh in the middle and Joyner hasn’t been as disruptive as expected off the edge.

Minnesota brought in 12 transfers before the season and not enough have been contributors. Brosmer, Robinson and running back Marcus Major have been assets, but others haven’t produced or are proving more developmental. Leading the wanting-more list are receiver Cristian Driver and nickleback Jai’Onte’ McMillan. Notably, the Gophers did not bring in a defensive tackle via the transfer portal.

The Gophers’ safeties might have been the most concerning position group going into the season. They played well for the most part in the nonconference slate, producing a handful of interceptions, but their lack of execution was a hinge point in the Hawkeyes loss.

Darius Green, the U’s most-experienced safety, had a particularly rough outing against Iowa. He was supposed to be a steadying veteran in the back end of the U secondary. Instead, he serves as a contributing anecdote of what can happen when the U’s best players don’t play their best.

Related Articles

Gophers football at Michigan: Keys to game, how to watch and who has edge

Gophers men’s basketball coach Ben Johnson shares some truth about NCAA transfer portal

Gov. Tim Walz to attend Gophers-Michigan football game Saturday in Ann Arbor

Gophers football: P.J. Fleck’s big buyout provides job security

Gophers football: ‘I-O-W-A!’ chant echoes in Huntington Bank Stadium

By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1969 and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Smith drily summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well in 1969.

Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for lead actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

Her work in 2012 netted three Golden Globe nominations for the globally successful “Downton Abbey” TV series and the films “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Quartet.”

Smith had a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes upstaging others.

Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t just take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, the director Peter Hall found that Smith wasn’t “remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots. She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people, too.”

Smith conceded that she could be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”

Smith famously drew laughs from a prosaic line — “This haddock is disgusting” — in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

“But unfortunately the critics mentioned it, and after that it never got a laugh,” she recalled. “The moment you say something is funny it’s gossamer. It’s gone, really.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there. … If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.

Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theatre company and cast her as his co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theatre productions, were important influences.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” said Bennett, who also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van.”

However extravagant she may have been on stage or before the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.

Simon Callow, who acted with her in “A Room with a View,” said he ruined their first meeting by spouting compliments.

“I blurted out various kinds of rubbish about her and she kind of withdrew. She doesn’t like that sort of thing very much at all,” Callow said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear.”

Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, in 1990.

She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby, and divorced in 1975. The same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

___

Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed biographical material to this obituary before his death in 2018.

Related Articles

Obituary: Father Robert Valit converted to Catholicism, spent years in monastic silence, found joy as parish priest

Larry Herke, Minnesota veterans affairs commissioner who retired after ALS diagnosis, dies at 61

James Earl Jones, acclaimed actor and voice of Darth Vader, dies at 93

Obituary: For former Forest Lake Police Chief Dave Schwartz, ‘the call to public service was strong’

Peggy Lynch, called the ‘conscience’ of St. Paul’s parks, dies at 90

MINNESOTA at No. 12 MICHIGAN

When: 11 a.m. CT Saturday
Where: Michigan Stadium, Ann Arbor, Mich.
TV: FOX
Radio: KFXN-FM, 100.3
Weather: 67 degrees, cloudy, 9 mph east wind
Betting spread: Michigan minus-10

Records: Minnesota (2-2, 0-1 Big Ten) is 0-2 against Power Four opponents with 31-14 loss to Iowa last Saturday. After a 31-12 loss to current No. 1 Texas in Week 2, Michigan (3-1, 1-0 Big Ten) rushed for the winning touchdown in the final minute to beat No. 13 USC 27-24 in the Big Ten opener last Saturday.

History: This is the 99th Little Brown Jug game, with Michigan holding a 72-23-3 lead in the all-time series. Minnesota hasn’t won the jug in four attempts since 2014.

Big questions: How do Gophers respond to second-half letdown in rivarly loss to Iowa? Few think Minnesota can hang with the defending national champs, but do players believe? and will head coach P.J. Fleck take the risks necessary to pull off an upset?

Key matchup: Gophers rush defense vs. Michigan run game. Minnesota allowed 272 yards and four touchdowns to Hawkeyes last week, while Michigan gained 290 with three scores against USC last week. It’s struggling vs. surging.

Who has the edge?

Gophers offense vs. Michigan defense: The Wolverines defensive line has four potential high NFL Draft picks across its four-man front: tackles Mason Graham, Kenneth Grant and ends Derrick Moore, Josiah Stewart. Their elite level is a major concern for the scuffling U offensive line and its almost nonexistent run game. Minnesota is uncharacteristically 108th in nation, putting up 117 yards per game. They declined to run the ball much against Iowa and could do so again vs. Michigan, which is 11th in country, allowing 76 yards per game. The Wolverines, however, have given up at least 222 passing yards and one score in each of its four games, including against Fresno State and Arkansas State. This aligns with the U’s strength. … QB Max Brosmer is completing 65 percent of passes this season, but his interception against Iowa led to a Hawkeyes touchdown in the first half. For Minnesota to pull off an upset, they will need to build on its plus-four turnover margin this season. Michigan, meanwhile, is minus-four. EDGE: Michigan

Gophers defense vs. Michigan offense: The Gophers’ tackling issues returned Saturday, with 12 misses, according to defensive coordinator Corey Hetherman. After having 22 missed tackles against North Carolina, Minnesota had cut that down to single digits against Rhode Island and Nevada in recent weeks. But level of competition matters. … Minnesota’s rush defense was last in Big Ten games a year ago, and they didn’t engender confidence an improvement is coming in opener against Iowa. Michigan had 46 rushes and only 12 pass attempts against USC. New QB Alex Orgi threw for 32 yards, while the 5-foot-3, 235-pound athlete rushed for 43. … … RB Kalel Minnings is averaging 8.1 yards per carry and has forced 17 tackles missed this year. …SAF Darius Green did not play like a veteran against the Hawkeyes, and that hurt a position group needing him to step up with Tyler Nubin in the NFL and Aidan Gousby injured. Senior CB Justin Walley should be able to comeback after missing the first game of his career last week. … DE Jah Joyner set a goal of double digit sacks and has only 1/2 sack and eight pressures through four games. EDGE: Michigan

Special teams: Freshman Koi Perich added kick return duties last week, on top of punts, and had four returns for 80 yards. … Michigan K Dominic Zvada is a perfect 5 for 5 on field goals this season, but hasn’t had a FG in the last two games. Minnesota K Dragan Kesich is 5 for 9 and didn’t have a boot last week. EDGE: Michigan

Prediction: All signs point to another Michigan romp and the disparity in the running game is the biggest reason why. It’s odd to see the betting spread so low. The Wolverines have won by an average of 44-14 in three games over P.J. Fleck’s three games at the U. This won’t be much better. Michigan, 33-13

Related Articles

Gophers men’s basketball coach Ben Johnson shares some truth about NCAA transfer portal

Gov. Tim Walz to attend Gophers-Michigan football game Saturday in Ann Arbor

Gophers football: P.J. Fleck’s big buyout provides job security

Gophers football: ‘I-O-W-A!’ chant echoes in Huntington Bank Stadium

P.J. Fleck’s plea: ‘Don’t give up on this team’ after Gophers’ loss to Iowa

A massive pipeline fire broke out last week outside of Houston, generating billowing black clouds of smoke that hovered over the industrialized suburb of Deer Park for multiple days. That fire began after an SUV hit a 20-inch-wide natural gas pipeline owned by Energy Transfer. The resulting explosion and fire killed the SUV driver, forced evacuations, and left hundreds of homes without power for nearly two days during a week of near-constant 90-degree heat. 

Energy Transfer, a corporate energy infrastructure giant, delayed issuing a response, including waiting more than three hours before confirming that it owned the exploded valve, misstating the amount of people injured by the fire, and seemingly refusing to answer questions from the public and the press. Unfortunately, this is par for the course for the company, also behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, and its infamous Executive Chairman (and ex-CEO) Kelcy Warren. 

Energy Transfer is one of the Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Texas, and Warren is its extremely politically connected co-founder. Warren is also one of the most generous donors in the Texas (and national) conservative political scene, and has funneled huge donations to politicians like Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. Warren’s investments, unfortunately, seem to have paid off. In 2021, Energy Transfer and its execs profiteered $2.4 billion off of the February collapse of Texas’ electric grid, which resulted in the deaths of at least 246 Texans. Governor Abbott subsequently, and successfully, steered scrutiny away from Energy Transfer and other energy companies who were either responsible for or profited from the crash. Mere months later, Warren sent Abbott’s campaign a million-dollar check.

Warren and other Energy Transfer leaders and lawyers now seem poised to manipulate the system in favor of the pipeline company once again, this time in the federal courts. 

Prior to the recent raging pipeline fire in Texas, Energy Transfer was behind a very different disaster unfolding at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that often acts as a watchdog for labor unions and regularly fields and reviews complaints from union members nationwide. In 2022, an unidentified employee of Energy Transfer’s subsidiary La Grange Acquisition filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company, alleging that it had retaliated against him for complaining about unsafe working conditions, including “radioactive material and hazardous dust in work areas.” The NLRB opened an administrative case, investigating those claims and the subsequent allegation that he was fired in part for filing the complaint.

In 2024, Energy Transfer sued the NLRB, seeking to halt the administrative proceedings and joining SpaceX, Amazon, and other corporations in basically arguing that the board’s foundational structure is unconstitutional. That argument threatens the basic function of the NLRB (and other agencies like it) and could have sweeping consequences for its ability to conduct investigations or engage in basic enforcement actions for violations of labor rules and regulations. 

That suit ultimately landed in front of Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown of the Southern District of Texas—a Trump appointee—who issued a preliminary injunction against the NLRB’s investigation into Energy Transfer in order to allow the company’s suit against the NLRB to proceed. 

Though the NLRB has nearly 90 years of case law supporting its structure and administrative court reviews, Brown’s ruling cited instead a recent Fifth Circuit ruling, Jarkesy v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which held that the SEC’s structure and enforcement procedures were unconstitutional. In July of this year, the Supreme Court partially affirmed Jarkesy, but remained silent on the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the (un)constitutionality of the SEC’s administrative law judges, a structure that the commission shares with the NLRB—and many other federal agencies. 

When the Supreme Court does not affirm nor reject an aspect of a ruling issued by a lower court, the lower court’s ruling is functionally left in place, which now poses a serious threat to the basic functionality of the SEC and other federal regulatory agencies that are mandated to act as watchdogs over unscrupulous corporations and in defense of the public interest. Contradictory rulings on the issue from other federal judges have highlighted the conflicting precedents that have allowed the Fifth Circuit to activate an issue that had been deemed settled for decades. 

The crux of SCOTUS’s Jarkesy ruling doesn’t clearly apply to the NLRB’s powers or proceedings—the case addresses an entirely different agency with different powers and authorities. Even so, Brown was the second Texas-based federal judge to cite the Fifth Circuit’s Jarkesy decision in a ruling against the NLRB, thereby playing his part in right-wing attempts to render the agency—along with the rest of the federal regulatory administration—nonexistent. Brown’s judicial overreach is unsurprising for a lifetime appointee who has been described by civil rights leaders as a right-wing “ideological extremist.” 

Of course, Brown’s apparently eager weaponization of his court to aid Energy Transfer’s corporate interests may also be contextualized, or perhaps motivated, by the prior relationships Brown has to Energy Transfer, its proxies, and its execs. 

Before becoming a federal judge in 2019, Brown served as an elected member of the Supreme Court of Texas.

During Brown’s 2018 reelection bid, Kelcy Warren gave Brown’s campaign $6,250, making Warren Brown’s third largest individual contributor overall, according to information compiled by TransparencyUSA.org. In 2014, during his first successful campaign for the seat, Brown’s campaign received $25,000 from the Texas Oil & Gas Association (TXOGA). The company’s Vice President of Government Affairs currently serves on TXOGA’s Board of Directors. 

Energy Transfer was represented before Brown’s court by Amber Michelle Rogers, a partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth, LLP. Hunton Andrews Kurth’s PAC donated a whopping $43,000 to Brown’s various judicial campaigns, making the firm’s PAC one of Brown’s top five biggest donors, per FollowTheMoney.org. 

When the company filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court supporting the court’s affirmation of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Jarkesy, it was represented by attorneys for Vinson & Elkins LLP. Vinson & Elkins’s PAC appears to be the third all-time biggest donor to Brown’s campaigns, contributing $63,500 over the course of his state judicial campaigns, according to data posted on FollowTheMoney.org.

Warren is also a member of the Horatio Alger Association, which has lavished gifts on Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the New York Times.

The significant financial interconnections between Energy Transfer, the lawyers representing the pipeline company, and Brown’s past campaigns are incredibly concerning. 28 U.S. Code § 455(a) establishes that a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” That same statute later dictates that, “He shall also disqualify himself” if he knows that he “has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” 

At minimum, the prior connections between Energy Transfer, its lawyers, and Judge Brown raise questions about Brown’s impartiality in this case. 

Yet, judicial ethics are largely predicated on self-reporting and enforcement standards, and Brown does not seem particularly concerned with the strictures of such a practice. An NPR investigation just this year found that he, along with two other Southern District of Texas judges, had failed to file a required form disclosing his attendance of a privately funded seminar. 

The case is far from settled, and it will now be heard by the Fifth Circuit with the NLRB’s appeal of Brown’s earlier ruling. What happens next is yet to be seen, but with the foundation of the government agency that historically has protected labor union members’ rights in the hands of a notoriously partisan court that previously attacked it, the outlook is not promising.