This week in Minnesota sports with Wally and Eric

CATHY WURZER: Switching focus a little bit here talking about the end of July, time for football, which kind of seems early but the Vikings are in training camp. The U of M Gophers are aiming for a national championship. It's a lot to talk about with Wally Langfellow, the founder of Minnesota Score magazine and the co-host of 10,000 Takes sports talk show. Eric Nelson is the other host of 10,000 Takes and the Minnesota Vikings reporter for CBS Sports Radio's Eye on the NFL. Guys, how are you?

WALLY LANGFELLOW: Did you actually say Gophers and national championship in the same sentence?

CATHY WURZER: I'm sorry. I think PJ Fleck was talking about that. That was not my view, Wally Longfellow.

ERIC NELSON: Cathy Sunshine. I love it.

CATHY WURZER: Right. Well, I mean wouldn't that be something if it actually were to happen?

WALLY LANGFELLOW: Let's get to a Rose Bowl first.

CATHY WURZER: Well, good point. Good point. How about the Vikings? Let's start with the Vikings. OK. The three of us have been waiting for this now for several weeks. Wally, they started on Wednesday.

WALLY LANGFELLOW: Well, in the words of Allen Iverson, we're talking about practice. Yeah. I know. Training camp's underway. The big news out of camp yesterday was that rookie Andrew Booth-- say that fast five times-- intercepted Kirk Cousins in some kind of a passing scrimmage. And that's the big news.

Yes. They're underway. New regime, of course, with Kevin O'Connell and his new coaching staff. Folks are optimistic. It is Eagan. It's all packaged neatly out there at the Vikings training facility in Eagan. It's not Mankato anymore.

I do miss the days of going to Mankato. I think a lot of people do. It's a lot more homogenized if you will. You've got to buy tickets. You've got to pay for parking. I mean there's all kinds of tripwires now if you want to go out to training camp. It's very much scheduled and not quite as freewheeling as it used to be. I miss those days. I probably won't make my way out to Eagan anytime soon.

CATHY WURZER: But Eric will.

WALLY LANGFELLOW: Oh, I doubt it.

ERIC NELSON: Yeah. TBD, Cathy.

CATHY WURZER: Oh.

ERIC NELSON: I do agree with Wally on this one. Training camp for the NFL isn't what it used to be. I mean here in the upper Midwest, once upon a time, we had the cheese league, which was a small scale version of say spring training in Arizona or Florida, the cactus and grapefruit leagues.

The Minnesota Vikings for decades trained at Minnesota State Mankato. They really were Minnesota's team or the upper Midwest, if you will. Green Bay is still in Northeastern Wisconsin. That tradition remained. Kansas City used to bring the Chiefs over to your alma mater, UW River Falls. I remember seeing Joe Montana and Marcus Allen over there. The New Orleans Saints came upriver to La Crosse. The Chicago Bears were in Platteville, Wisconsin.

This was special. And for the teams like Kansas City and New Orleans, they would escape the saunalike heat in those areas and those regions. And it was like air conditioning practicing in Wisconsin. So I remember going around one day seeing the Vikings, and then seeing the Chiefs, then the Saints, then the Bears. It was a lot of fun. But you don't have that anymore in the NFL. It is all packaged.

Most teams practice at their facility, including the Vikings at TCO Performance Center in Eagan. But there are a group-- I'm calling them the Elite Eight, Cathy, that actually still practice in a college setting. They stay in dorms. And they try to build camaraderie. It would be Buffalo, Carolina, Dallas, which is training north of Los Angeles.

Believe it or not, the LA Rams train at UC Irvine in Orange County, Kansas City is in Saint Joseph, Missouri. The Pittsburgh Steelers for about 50 years now have trained at La Trobe, Pennsylvania's Saint Vincent College. The Indianapolis Colts are away from their facility as is Jacksonville. But those teams are swimming upstream. Everybody else stays home.

CATHY WURZER: OK. Hey. Let's talk about the Twins. Should I get a little nervous about where we are in terms of how they're leading their division? They have kind of a shaky league, Wally.

WALLY LANGFELLOW: Yeah. They do. They're only a game and a half up on Cleveland now. They lost both to the Milwaukee Brewers in Milwaukee this past week. They are in San Diego right now. They'll play the Padres in a three game set beginning tomorrow night.

And the tipping point of this or the interest point, they could see former Twin Taylor Rogers who really was the backbone of the back end of their bullpen. They traded him to San Diego at the beginning of the year. It was definitely a monetary move because Rogers' contract was up at the end of the year. They didn't want to lose him so they figured they'd get something out of the deal.

Well, what they've got out of the deal so far, a couple of pitchers that have not produced, Emilio Pagán one of them. He has been less than stellar. And Paddack has been on the injured list so those two guys have not panned out. Rogers is one of the leading relievers in the National League so far, and although he did get knocked around yesterday by the way. He got beat by Detroit.

But the Twins have struggled. Their bullpen has just been abysmal. And yesterday was no different. Jharel Cotton came in. And he got rocked yesterday. Their bullpen has given up more home runs than any team in the American League. And that is not a good sign.

They've given up more than Tampa Bay. And Tampa's bullpen tends to be used more than anybody else. They have more innings logged just the way that they do things in Tampa. So I guess the big news going forward here is, will the Twins make a move before the August 2 trade deadline to get some pitching to try and help their hopes down the stretch here? If they're going to make a run, they're going to need more pitching. And they're going to have to make a move.

CATHY WURZER: Eric.

ERIC NELSON: Well, the good news, Cathy, is I'm always looking for the bright side of things, unlike Wally. The Twins get an off day in San Diego, which is self-proclaimed America's most livable city. Right. And off days in a Major League Baseball season are cherished. You play 162 games, roughly 30 to 40 in spring training. So these are things that players covet.

So you have a free day out there in SoCal. Think of the choices for the Twins, Cathy. They can surf. They can hike. They can eat fish tacos. They can go to the San Diego Zoo. They can go to Coronado Island. They can go down to the border if they want. Mexico is 15 miles away. This beats a free day in Detroit, or Saint Louis, or Wally's hometown of Cleveland.

WALLY LANGFELLOW: Hey. Hey. Hey.

ERIC NELSON: I hope the Twins are getting recharged out there in San Diego. Great place to have an off day.

CATHY WURZER: Yes. I wouldn't mind an off day out in San Diego myself. Say, before we go, we got to talk about Larry McKenzie, Coach McKenzie from Minneapolis North High, one of the winningest high school basketball coaches in state history. He's retiring. And Wally and Eric had a chance to talk to him on Morning Edition. And he said some really interesting things about why he is leaving. He is not happy with some of the new rules at the Minnesota State High School League.

WALLY LANGFELLOW: Yeah. One of them being the NIL, the name, image, and licensing. That's the same thing that is going on in college sports right now. And that's one of those changes and I think that more so the overall changes just within the environment of high school basketball. Larry and I are close friends. And he has told me these things over the last several years. We broadcast together.

And we've been doing the state high school tournament on the radio for the last 15, 20 years now. And Larry was just-- I think he had just reached a point where if he couldn't do things his way, it was time to move on. And I think that social media has a lot to do with it, Cathy, because a lot of these kids know, what they're doing in high school basketball, it's all about them and not necessarily about the team. And I know that really bothered a coach like Larry McKenzie.

CATHY WURZER: Mm-hm. You know, I've got about a minute left here, Eric. You want to tell me about the Gophers going to the national championship?

ERIC NELSON: Well, this week they've had Big Ten Football Media day. It's really a two-day event down there in Indianapolis, Indiana. Let the fertilizer fly. Right. There's currently 14 teams in the Big Ten, soon to go to 16 and maybe, who knows, 20. The Big Ten wants to conquer the world.

But yeah, all the teams are optimistic. Everybody's undefeated. Everyone thinks they're going to win a national title, including the Minnesota Gophers. But I'll throw the gauntlet down here in our final seconds. If they don't win the Big Ten West this year or next year, which they've never done in school history, and go to the Big Ten title game, it may never happen because USC and UCLA are the elephants in the room.

CATHY WURZER: OK.

ERIC NELSON: They'll soon join the conference. Notre Dame, maybe Stanford. Minnesota better do it now.

CATHY WURZER: All right. We've heard it. Wally Langfellow, Eric Nelson. Thanks, you guys. Talk to you later. Have a good week.