There have been times, watching Minnesota United FC, that by halftime I was mumbling to myself, “What the heck was that?”

Saturday, against Austin FC, was one of those times - but for once, it was because the Loons were actually dominating the game.

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Back at the end of Minnesota United FC’s 2023 season, when they’d fired manager Adrian Heath and committed themselves to change, most observers thought it was the dawning of the second MLS era of MNUFC. Things would be different, we thought. Major changes might be afoot. There’d be a new coach! A new chief soccer officer making the decisions! And, therefore, the team would look immensely different!

And now it’s Opening Day of the 2024 season, and - well, not much has changed.

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Note: I went on vacation this week, so instead of the usual sports content, you’re getting Dad Content.

It wasn’t until I told people that I was going to Disney World that I found out just how little I knew about Disney World.

I knew that Disneyland is in California, and Disney World is in Florida. I also knew that I grew up thinking of Disney World as the most remote, unachievable vacation destination known to man. I think I knew one person who went, out of all of my friends, and it was like he went to the moon. When he came back, he had to do a special show-and-tell in class at school.

(To give you some idea of how common exotic vacations were, in western Minnesota, in the 1990s: I remember another friend having to do this in junior high, after he went on a cruise with his family.)

Anyway, we planned a winter getaway to Orlando with my family and my parents, and so my wife and I had about eight conversations that went something like this:

WIFE: And of course, while we’re down there, we have to take the kids to Disney World.
ME: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t notice - did the money tree you planted in the backyard finally start producing hundreds?

Eventually, of course, I broke down. We were going to be in Orlando, regardless, so this seemed like it might be our only chance to go. And that’s when I started finding out how little I knew about Disney World.

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Last week, I was updating my notes based on Minnesota United FC’s off-season roster changes, including listing out the team by position to make sure I hadn’t missed anyone. And it was only then that I realized - and it was a genuine shock - something that hasn’t been true for years:

You know, the Loons might not play a 4-2-3-1 this year.

Former manager Adrian Heath liked to keep things pretty much steady, formation-wise, from year to year; he’d occasionally try other things, especially on the road, but I can only find a few examples from the past few years. We knew what we were going to see from his teams, to the point that if they even changed up something minor like their build-out, or their pressing shape, it felt unsettling to watch.

Now, of course, we’re into the - well, not the new era, but the in-between limbo between the eras, as interim manager Cameron Knowles takes charge, and we wait for Khaled El-Ahmad to figure out the team’s new direction. We don’t actually know for sure what the team is going to change on the field; on opening day, they may well line up in the exact same formation as they always have. But I do think it’s worth speculating on what else might change about MNUFC, beyond the lineup on the field.

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The NHL All-Star Break is not the season’s halfway point, of course. The Minnesota Wild have played 49 games and have 33 remaining. However, even though we’re long past halfway in this season, one thing seems pretty clear: this team stinks. It’s going nowhere.

You don’t have to dive deep into the numbers to see that. The standings show that the Wild are 21-28 this year, with five losing bonus points; just 16 of those wins are regulation wins. Remove the overtime and shootout circuses, and they’ve won fewer than one out of three games they’ve played this year.

That said, it’s worth a look at some of the underlying numbers to see why this team - which is much the same, personnel-wise, as the playoff teams of years prior - has fallen so far down the standings.

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Joe Mauer is a first-ballot Hall of Famer!

I admit that, when it was announced on TV, such was my excitement that I stood up almost involuntarily, like someone had hit a deep fly ball to left-center. I’d been tracking the public ballots for weeks, like a lot of Twins fans, but I was very nervous for the announcement; the type of Hall of Fame voters who don’t want to reveal their ballots were also, probably, the type to look down their noses at Mauer’s candidacy.

His value was obvious, but the pitfalls of his Hall of Fame candidacy were also obvious - the concussion that cut short his catching career, his five unremarkable years as a first baseman, career numbers that were light if you compared him to anyone but other catchers. And so, like almost everyone prior to this year’s process, I expected him to have to serve a sentence in purgatory - two or three or four years, atoning for the sin of getting a brain injury, before finally joining the Hall.

Like almost all Minnesotans, I was - and am - a huge Mauer fan, a fandom that was shot through with protectiveness as Mauer’s career proceeded. After the brain injury, I was ready to argue on Mauer’s behalf at any moment; after his final game, one of my overriding feelings was a huge feeling of relief.

So let’s start with that caveat, that I’m thrilled for Mauer, and desperately wanted him to get the call. But I also think it’s interesting to look back and try to figure out why there seemed to be so many people that were, somehow, anti-Joe.

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Here are three Minnesota sports stories that seem totally absurd.

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One of the best features of the weekly paper in my hometown, the Ortonville Independent, was a trawl through the paper’s archives. Each week, we’d get a rundown of what the news was in years gone by - usually for quarter-century milestones. (This was, of course, particularly exciting if you happened to have a milestone birthday that week.)

With this in mind, I decided to hit the archives, just to check out the Minnesota sports news for this date.

100 years ago: January 16, 1924

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We already know, two days into the Vikings offseason, that one topic is going to dominate Purple talk until September: is Kirk Cousins coming back? Should Cousins come back? Do the Vikings want him back? If he goes elsewhere, should the Vikings have brought him back?

He says, of course, that he wants to be back (and what athlete ever says anything else?) He even hinted that he might be willing to take less money to make it happen, though his agent probably would have some criticisms of that move.

The Vikings will be stuck in weird NFL-style salary cap jail no matter what; if you want your head to hurt, go look into Cousins’s current contract, which runs through 2027 but also voids on March 15, and somehow costs $28.5 million against the cap anyway in 2024, but $0 thereafter, and also from a pure accounting standpoint, all the money has already been paid. (Does any of that make sense to you? Good. It shouldn’t.)

But apart from the QB circus, there are three bigger problems that the Vikings need to worry about.

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Today’s a day that doesn’t happen all that often: it’s the first day of a new pro sports franchise in Minnesota. Tonight, PWHL Minnesota - the Cougars? - plays its first game, visiting Boston.

I presume that there will not be 406 penalty minutes and a coach punching a fan, but you never know in Minnesota-Boston games, I suppose.

A recap of other first-days-of-franchise for Minnesota’s pro teams:

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