The Gophers football team’s internal media day is a prime opportunity for players to look good. After countless workouts to get into their best shape, each one dressed in their Saturday best — new maroon jersey and pants, striped in gold and white — to pose for an array of photos and videos for in-season use.

Preseason All-America left tackle Aireontae Ersery had a black comb in hand to better place his hair just right, while all-Big Ten linebacker Cody Lindenberg had three small white wristbands ready to hug his muscled arms when the cameras flashed.

But a handful of veteran players didn’t feel good on Thursday — at least not when discussing the Gophers’ what-could-have-been 5-7 regular season in 2023. They added a sixth win over Bowling Green in the Quick Lane Bowl.

“It didn’t sit well,” defensive back Jack Henderson said. “I don’t think it sat well with anybody. But we completely flipped the script when December happened and what we have been doing from January to now is night-and-day difference. We are looking for different results this year. We are working really hard and looking at turning it up this fall.”

However, ESPN and a handful of betting sites don’t foresee an uptick in wins this fall. Six prognosticators peg the Gophers’ over/under win total between 4.5 and 5.5 this fall. ESPN’s model has the U at 5.3 wins.

“Ignore it,” Ersery said about his reaction to those projections. “Focus on the now. Focus on our team. Focus on the (offensive) line. Focus on continuing to get better every day.”

Defensive end Danny Striggow said in an ideal world a positive thing motivates players. But when it was negative, no one is needed to push buttons or light a fire, he said.

“Sometimes you need a kick in the butt,” Striggow said. “Hey, what we did last year didn’t work. We are going to use that to change how we work this year to be able to say, ‘I don’t want to go through another season like that.’ ”

Striggow lamented the 37-34 loss to Northwestern in September and the 49-30 loss to Purdue in November. The 27-26 defeat to Illinois in early November can also be thrown in the mix as winnable games that got away.

“At the end of the day, you look back at the season (and) we left so much (meat) on the bone, we left a lot of things out there,” Striggow said. “It spoke for itself for a lot of guys on the team.”

Defensive tackle Jalen Logan-Redding offered: “I feel like a lot of people are underestimating us as a team.”

Why? “Because they look at that schedule and see we don’t have any talented players — and that is truly not it,” he replied.

Another tough schedule awaits the Gophers, starting in less than 50 days with the opener against North Carolina at Huntington Bank Stadium on Aug. 29. After Rhode Island and Nevada visit Minneapolis, the Gophers host rival Iowa and travel to defending national champion Michigan to end September.

October starts with Big Ten newcomers: Southern Cal at home on Oct. 5, followed by UCLA at the Rose Bowl on Oct. 12.  Maryland, Illinois and Rutgers are next up, with Penn State at home and a road trip to rival Wisconsin to close November.

The Gophers’ depth was stretched in 2023, primary at linebacker but also receiver, where contributor Le’Meke Brockington missed the majority of the season with a broken leg.

“I kind of feel like we have something to prove, especially with a lot of guys going down last year,” Brokington said. “Our depth started getting low, just a bunch of injuries and some freshman guys who had to step in way earlier than they thought. I feel like we got more to prove.”

Fellow receiver Daniel Jackson said he’s grown used to outside naysayers during his five years in Dinkytown.

“Overlooked or under-looked, I don’t think it really matters,” he said. “I don’t typically have an opinion on that because a lot of people know we are Minnesota football. We are never going to be the most highly touted team ever, so that comes with the territory (and it’s about) using that to hunger you.”

Setting the line

A sampling of over/under predictions for the Gophers football team’s win total this fall:

5.5 — Fan Duel, Covers.com, BetMGM

5 — DraftKings

4.5 — Vegas Insider

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In “Teen Torture, Inc.,” the three-part documentary on Max about abuses children and adolescents have survived at various boarding schools, boot camps and religious programs intended to curb rebellious behavior, a phrase comes up again and again: The troubled teen industry. It’s an industry.

That’s a chilling reality describing what author Evan Wright calls a “grab bag of all these different programs based on the idea that no matter what it takes, we’re gonna make these kids follow the rules because what they’re doing is so dangerous, it will destroy their lives.”

In many cases, the abuse is the treatment.

Director Tara Malone talks to a handful of now-adult survivors who recall, in detail, their harrowing experiences. Alas, the seriousness of their stories is continually undermined by Malone’s stylistic choices, from the use of what appear to be grainy dramatic recreations to a score that seems intended to emulate a horror movie. It’s entirely misjudged and suggests the documentary isn’t a Max (HBO) original, but something made for Discovery’s more sensationalist programming, which also (not incidentally) streams on Max. This blurring might be intentional. Either way, it detracts from the overall quality of the work.

The survivors deserve better than a documentary this shameless and crass.

Even so, they tell their stories with clear-headed disgust. The pain is still very close to the surface. One survivor says she was forcibly injected with Haldol when she refused to get out of bed one morning. Another survivor talks about being waterboarded as a 10-year-old. “What does that do to somebody?” he asks. “What does it do to everybody that watched that?”

Allen Knoll and Dave Bowsher standing outside the City of Refuge hoping to get answers in the documentary “Teen Torture, Inc.” (Talos Films/Max/TNS)

Malone interviews experts besides Wright, but his insights are strongest, perhaps because he also had first-hand experience with these programs, which he details in “The Seed: A Memoir.” (As a journalist, Wright has written for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, and he is probably best known as the author of the 2004 non-fiction book “Generation Kill.”)

There are a thousand known troubled-teen programs operating across the country, he says. Some are run by large corporations. Some are small businesses that exist under the radar as far as state regulators are concerned. Employees are not necessarily licensed mental health or medical professionals. “You’re basically signing away custody (and therefore) that program has the right to make medical decisions for your kid,” says Maia Szalavitz, author of “Help at Any Cost.” But it’s not therapeutic, she adds: “‘Troubled teen’ is not a diagnosis.”

In many cases, when kids act out, they are working through untreated mental health issues, or are coming from homes where they are being abused or neglected. Behavior modification becomes the focus. If that sounds like an innocuous term, Wright pushes back: “The only difference between brainwashing and behavior modification is that if it’s done in a Chinese prison camp, we call it brainwashing. If it’s done in a rehab for teens, it’s called behavior modification. But it’s the same thing.”

All told, these programs affect somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand young people a year, at a cost of $30,000 to $60,000 per person. According to Wright, the programs are more profitable if they “fail” because “the longer the child is held there, the more money they make.”

The documentary allows survivors to recount their experiences with dignity, but it doesn’t go deeper. It doesn’t tell us about what relationships exist, if any, between the survivors and their parents. Or — with the exception of one woman seen briefly at home with her young child and partner — what their lives are like now.

They are, of course, entitled to privacy. But from a filmmaking perspective, Malone’s approach is so limiting that each person is reduced to the worst moment in their lives.

“Teen Torture, Inc.” — 2 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Max

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

It may have taken a quarter century to develop a luxury waterfront hotel in Oceanside, California, but it’s apparently paid off.  The Mission Pacific Beach Resort, which made its debut three years ago, has been named the No. 1 resort in the continental U.S. by Travel and Leisure’s readers.

The 161-room, seven-story hotel, which boasts a Michelin-starred restaurant on the premises, was also named the top resort in California. It outranked many long acclaimed properties, including Rancho Valencia in Rancho Santa Fe, which frequently garners recognition in national rankings. It came in at No. 11 in this year’s reader survey of best resorts in the U.S., although it was fourth in 2021.

“I think everyone was completely surprised,” Tim Obert, area managing director of Mission Pacific Beach Resort, said of Tuesday’s announcement. He also manages the hotel’s sister property, The Seabird Ocean Resort & Spa, which was ranked 14th.

“It’s our guests who voted for us, and they’re well traveled and experienced. They know what great is, so it’s flattering that they were kind enough to take the time to vote for us. We had hoped we would score well, but I don’t think any of us expected that we would be No. 1.”

View of Oceanside pier from Mission Pacific Beach Resort. (Mission Pacific Beach Resort)

Travel and Leisure’s article announcing the top resorts is headlined, “The Resort Voted Best in the Continental U.S. Overlooks an Underrated California Beach and Has a Michelin-star Mexican Restaurant.”

It describes the resort on N. Myers Street, as “a place you never really need to leave to have a good time. It’s home to both a Michelin-starred restaurant (Valle, which serves tasty Mexican bites) and a rooftop bar serving craft cocktails that are ideal at sunset.”

Included within the resort is the “Top Gun” Victorian house featured in the 1986 movie. (Mission Pacific Beach Resort)

The resort, it points out, is also home to the original “Top Gun” house, a 19th century Victorian cottage that appeared in the original Top Gun film released in 1986.

Mission Pacific Beach also made it onto Travel and Leisure’s Top 100 Hotels in the World for 2024, ranking No. 11. The only other California hotel to rank higher was the Pendry Newport Beach.

To compile the list of top resorts, Travel and Leisure asks its readers each year to weigh in on their travel experiences, not only for hotels and resorts, but also for cities, cruise ships, airlines and other hospitality segments. More than 186,000 readers completed the 2024 survey, the magazine said, and more than 700,000 votes were cast across all categories.

Hotels were specifically rated on such criteria as rooms and facilities, location, service, food and value.

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The two sister resorts in Oceanside had something of a tortured history as the city sought to bring a destination resort to the oceanfront site since the 1970s. It began courting developers in the 1980s for the two-block site bisected by the western end of Mission Avenue, with boundaries at Pacific and Myers streets, Pier View Way and Seagaze Drive.

Back in 2005, the city of Oceanside chose S.D. Malkin Properties from a field of three finalists. It was Oceanside’s fourth try in 25 years to land a luxury hotel for the site. The project would eventually break ground in 2019.

“When it opened in May of 2021, it opened during COVID, a difficult time to launch any hotel,” Obert said. “So it started slowly and now has gained its footing and competes very well in the market. We run around 67, 70 percent occupancy for the year, but this year we’ll be closer to the low 70s. Like all resorts during the summer through Labor Day, we run well north of 80 percent occupancy.

“Our owners continue to reinvest in the property on a regular basis. They have a luxury retail background and they continue to reinvent the product to be current and relevant.”