It will be a rare edition of Late Night with Gopher Football on Saturday when Minnesota faces Cal in Berkeley, Calif.
Make that a very late night.
The contest will kick off at 7:30 p.m. local time — 9:30 p.m. CT — and likely will not end much before 1 a.m. for folks watching back home in the Twin Cities. Gophers head coach P.J. Fleck said he has gone over the best way to prepare for the late start with a sleep doctor.
“We have a certain process that we do any time when we’re heading to different time zones,” Fleck said. “We gained a ton of data and then we put together the best plan we possibly can to make sure that we can play our best football from 9:30 Central to almost 1 a.m. Central on our bodies. There’s a lot of things we have to do for that to happen, not only just the football preparation like a normal week, but we have to do a lot of other things to move some schedule pieces around. I think our players are going to handle that really well.”
Minnesota is 3-0 in West Coast games under Fleck, including a 21-17 victory over UCLA in Pasadena, Calif., last season. The Gophers also posted wins at Oregon State in 2017 and Fresno State in 2019.
A bigger challenge for Minnesota (2-0) will be trying to deal with Cal’s talented true freshman quarterback, Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele.
The 19-year-old left-hander became just the second Cal true freshman to start a season opener when he led the Golden Bears to a 34-15 win at Oregon State on Aug. 30, joining current Detroit Lions star Jared Goff, who did it in 2013.
Sagapolutele earned ACC Rookie of the Week honors that week after finishing 20-of-30 passing for 234 yards and three touchdowns. He followed it up by throwing for 267 yards and rushing for a touchdown in a 35-3 victory over FCS Texas Southern last Saturday.
“He’s a really, really talented quarterback,” Fleck said. “The poise for him as a true freshman is very rare. We’ve got our work cut out for us, that’s for sure.”
The Bears limited Texas Southern to just 192 yards and held an opponent without a touchdown for the first time since Oct. 23, 2021, against Colorado. Still, Cal coach Justin Wilcox said there was room for improvement for his squad.
“When you keep the other team from scoring a touchdown, that’s really good,” Wilcox said. “However, the expectation of how we play there was just a lot of things that we’re going to need to improve upon. How we rush the quarterback, how we tackle at certain positions, our decisions at the end of the play.”
Cal will play the first half without star linebacker Cade Uluave, who was ejected after a targeting penalty in the third quarter against Texas Southern.
Minnesota could be without starting tailback Darius Taylor, who has dealt with hamstring injuries in the past and left last week’s 66-0 blowout of Northwestern State with an apparent right leg injury.