The Gophers saw three key tight ends run out of eligibility in 2025 and the U began to replace them with an external option in Oklahoma transfer Kaden Helms on Wednesday.

The 6-foot-5, 240-pound player committed to Minnesota after he visited the U campus this week. The four-star recruit out of Bellevue, Neb., appears to have two years of eligibility remaining.

Helms can help fill the void left by Jameson Geers, Drew Bieber and Frank Bierman, who each played roles in the U offense in 2025. Pierce Walsh leads a group of returning tight ends for 2026.

Helms played 201 offensive snaps for the Sooners last season, with a subpar overall grade (51.1), according to Pro Football Focus. He played 71 snaps in 2024 and 31 during a redshirt year in 2022. He was injured in 2023 and didn’t play.

Helms is the 14th total player to join the U since the transfer portal opened on Friday.

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The Gophers men’s basketball team didn’t have a lot to be thankful for around Thanksgiving.

Over that holiday, Minnesota lost its second and third straight games at the AcriSure Series in Palm Desert, Calif., and the U didn’t have much of a pulse in the latter game, falling 86-75 to Santa Clara on Nov. 28.

Minnesota Golden Gophers guard Langston Reynolds, middle, passes the ball while Iowa Hawkeyes guard Kael Combs (11) and guard Isaia Howard (23) defend during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Bailey Hillesheim)

In the previous week, the U had lost starting point guard Chansey Willis Jr., to a season-ending foot injury and starting center Robert Vaihola had played his last game this year because of a knee injury.

“I think we were still a little rattled by some of the injuries,” head coach Niko Medved recalled Tuesday. “… All of sudden, you knew right away the team was going to look a lot different than even we had planned back in the fall.”

With a weaker nonconference schedule, the Gophers were mired at 4-4 overall going into December.

Since then, the shorthanded Gophers have declined excuses and won six of seven games, including a 70-67 victory over No. 19 Iowa at Williams Arena on Tuesday. Minnesota now sits at 10-5 overall and 3-1 to start Big Ten play.

“You are either going to embrace it or you are just going to give in,” Medved said, “and we’re not going to give in.”

Guard Langston Reynolds was one of 13 new players on Medved’s first roster at Minnesota. With Willis’ injury, the Northern Colorado transfer moved from a sixth-man role into the starting lineup. He had a game-high 22 points against the Hawkeyes.

“Obviously, we had a lot of guys go down at random times, which (is) terrible. It’s horrible,” Reynolds said. “But just sticking with it, that was the biggest thing. Not splitting off. A lot of teams would split off and say, ‘I’m going to get mine.’ But it wasn’t like that. We thought we had to play for those guys and play for each other. That’s what we can do.”

The Gophers are also without backup forward BJ Omot (leg) and reserve guard Chance Stephens (illness), shrinking their bench even more. That pair of transfers haven’t played all season, leaving the U to rely on a seven-man rotation.

The Gophers started the New Year with an 84-78 win at Northwestern on Saturday. Reynolds, Cade Tyson and Isaac Asuma each played all 40 minutes in the win.

“I’ve never seen that in a college game — at least not one I’ve been a part of,” said Medved, who has been coaching for 29 years, 13 as a head coach.

Reynolds and Asuma each played more than 36 minutes against the Hawkeyes, with two freshman, Grayson Grove and Kai Shinholster, logging more than 15 apiece.

“The other thing when you have injuries like that, it creates clarity now,” Medved said. “The decision tree is gone. These are the seven guys in the rotation. We’ve got to find a way to make it work.”

The Gophers have been able to find success for a few reasons.

Simply, they haven’t backed down when things get dicey. They showed toughness in battling back from a seven-point deficit in the second half against the Wildcats, then weathered a late 20-5 run against the Hawkeyes.

Forward Jaylen Crocker-Johnson, who followed Medved as a transfer from Colorado State, has been a leader also logging big minutes. He hit a clutch 3-pointer to stave off Iowa with a minute to go.

Minnesota guard Isaac Asuma drives on Iowa’s Kael Combs in a Big Ten basketball game Tuesday, January 6, 2026, at Williams Arena in Minneapolis. (Brad Rempel / Gophers Athletics)

“In the past, teams go up seven or eight, we would kind of lose ourselves,” Crocker-Johnson said Monday. “We are definitely making a lot of jumps recently. I would say, just staying calm, staying together.”

Medved’s offense prides itself on constant cutting, screens and sharing the ball at a high rate. Coming into Tuesday, the U led the nation in assist percentage (75.9), and against Iowa they had assists on 68% of their baskets (15 of 22).

Tyson’s scoring has been a driving force. The transfer from North Carolina is second in the Big Ten at 21.7 points per game.

On defense, Minnesota has been able to — at least partially — limit some of other team’s best players. Iowa’s Bennett Stirtz, Northwestern’s Nick Martinelli and Indiana’s Tucker DeVries each found it frustrating at times against the Gophers.

For instance, Stirtz was held scoreless in the first half against Minnesota and early foul trouble also played a role in that.

The Hawkeyes came into the game at No. 2 in the conference in field goal percentage (51.9), but Minnesota limited them to under 38%.

“My experience has been, over the years, whenever you go through things like this, you become a better coach,” Medved said. “It doesn’t feel good at the time, but you get challenged. You’ve got to change the way you think, got to embrace it and you become better. I think people do, too. Players have embraced that.”

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The Washington County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday decided on their leadership team for the year. Commissioner Karla Bigham will serve as board chair, and Commissioner Bethany Cox will serve as vice chair.

Washington County Commissioners Karla Bigham, left, and Bethany Cox (Courtesy of Bigham and Cox)

Bigham, elected in 2022, is serving in her second term on the county board; she previously served from 2015 to 2018. She also served in the Minnesota Senate, the Minnesota House of Representatives and on the Cottage Grove City Council.

Cox, elected to the board in November 2024, worked as director of development at the Wild Rivers Conservancy of the St. Croix and Namekagon from 2019 to 2024.

The board also recently approved staff and board pay increases. By a 4-1 vote, the board approved pay increases last month for County Administrator Kevin Corbid, Sheriff Dan Starry and County Attorney Kevin Magnuson for 2026; Commissioner Michelle Clasen was the “no” vote in each of the three motions.

Corbid will earn $259,284, a 6 percent increase over last year’s salary. Magnuson will earn $240,466 and Starry $230,605, both 6 percent increases.

The board members voted unanimously to give themselves 3 percent raises; each commissioner now makes $88,051 a year.

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By JOSH BOAK, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he wants to block large institutional investors from buying houses, saying that a ban would make it easier for younger families to buy their first homes.

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Trump — who has been under pressure to address voters’ concerns about affordability ahead of November midterm elections — is tapping into long-standing fears that corporate ownership of homes has pushed out traditional buyers, forcing more people to rent. But his plan does little to address the overarching challenge for the housing market: a national shortage of home construction and prices that have climbed faster than incomes.

“People live in homes, not corporations,” Trump said in a social media post as he called on Congress to codify his ban.

Last month, Trump pledged in a prime-time address that he would roll out “some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history” this year. The president said he would discuss housing and affordability in more detail in two weeks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an event known for attracting CEOs, wealthy financiers and academics with a global focus who often run contrary to Trump’s populist rhetoric.

The president has in the past floated extending the 30-year mortgage to 50 years in order to lower monthly payments, an idea that has been criticized because it would reduce people’s ability to create housing equity and increase their own wealth.

With Trump’s proposed ban, the challenge is that institutional investors are only a tiny sliver of homebuyers, accounting for just 1% of total single-family housing stock, according to an August analysis by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank based in Washington, D.C. The analysis defined these investors as owning 100 or more properties.

The analysis notes that institutional ownership varies nationwide, reaching 4.2% in Atlanta, 2.6% in Dallas and 2.2% in Houston. But these investors tend not to dominate neighborhoods, even if they’re generally more concentrated in lower and middle-income communities.

The larger challenge has been a shortage of new construction, such that Goldman Sachs in October estimated in October that 3 million to 4 million additional homes beyond the normal construction levels would need to be built to relieve cost pressures. Mortgage rates also climbed in the inflation that followed the coronavirus pandemic, causing monthly payments on home loans to increase dramatically faster than incomes.

Still, Trump said last month that an increase in new construction would create a dilemma as it could cause existing home values to drop and that would come at the expense of many existing homeowners’ net worth.

“I don’t want to knock those numbers down because I want them to continue to have a big value for their house,” Trump said. “At the same time, I want to make it possible for young people out there and other people to buy housing. In a way, they’re at conflict.”