Minnesota had not beaten Michigan at home since 1977. Not since Memorial Stadium, a building that was torn down 34 years ago. Today the Minnesota Golden Gophers won it 20-14, and both touchdowns came from a senior running back out of Detroit. Darius Taylor scored on a 2-yard run in the first quarter and caught a 3-yard pass from Drake Lindsey in the fourth. Those were Minnesota's only touchdowns all day. Liam Drzewiecki kicked the rest. Taylor has not had a clean season. He missed the Akron game hurt and played through it against Mississippi State. He is in his fourth year now, twice Academic All-Big Ten. He is also from Detroit, Michigan, which matters more than it sounds. Because on October 22, 1977, Minnesota beat the number one team in the country 16-0 in front of 44,165 people at Memorial Stadium. They called that place the Brick House. The Michigan Wolverines were undefeated and ranked first, and it was the only regular season game they lost all year. Paul Rogind kicked three field goals that afternoon. There was exactly one touchdown in the entire game. A 3-yard run in the first quarter. It was scored by a freshman from Detroit named Marion Barber Jr. Barber left Minnesota as the leading rusher in school history. 3,094 yards. 34 touchdowns. Twelve 100-yard games. Two-time All-Big Ten and team MVP. The New York Jets took him in the second round in 1981. He also left without finishing his degree. In 2017, at 57 years old, he walked across a stage at the University of Minnesota and graduated with a degree in youth services. Perfect attendance. With honors. His wife Karen had pushed him to go back. But she was not the reason he went. "I made a promise to my mother," Barber said that day. "I've been crying. A lot of happy tears of course. Excited to make that walk." He works with special education students at Armstrong High School now, and coaches football there. All three of his sons played for the Golden Gophers. Marion III became a Pro Bowl running back for the Dallas Cowboys and died in 2022 at 38. Dominique played safety for the Houston Texans. Thomas was an All-Big Ten linebacker who piled up 274 tackles and seven fumble recoveries, still tied for second in school history. This fall, Thomas Barber came back to Minneapolis as Minnesota's defensive graduate assistant. His first season on staff. So when the clock hit zero on 20-14 today, in the 100th game ever played for the Little Brown Jug, there was a Barber standing on the Minnesota sideline. 49 years after his father scored the touchdown that beat Michigan in this city. The honest part: Michigan still leads this series 78-26-3, and Minnesota's last win over them anywhere was 2014 in Ann Arbor. One Saturday does not undo a century. And the Brick House is gone. They knocked it down in 1992 and kept the front arch, which stands outside the alumni center now, a few hundred yards from where all of it happened. 49 years is a long time to wait on one building, one trophy, one city. Two kids from Detroit. One at each end of it.

Maurice Clarett won a national championship at 19 years old. He could barely read. He said it out loud this week, on The Pivot. "I couldn't read real well, comprehend, do anything prior to playing football." Start with what he did on the field, because it is easy to forget how good he was. In 2002, as a true freshman at Ohio State, Clarett ran for 1,237 yards, which was a school record at the time, and scored 18 touchdowns. The Buckeyes went 14-0. And in the Fiesta Bowl against Miami, in double overtime, for the national championship, Maurice Clarett scored the winning touchdown on a five yard run. He was the first freshman to lead a national championship team in rushing since Ahman Green in 1995. Nineteen years old. On top of the entire sport. And he has said he was already fighting depression and alcoholism by then. What happened next is one of the fastest collapses in the history of college football. He was suspended in 2003. He sued the NFL over the rule that kept players out of the draft for three years after high school, won at the district level, and lost on appeal to a panel that included a judge named Sonia Sotomayor. The Supreme Court declined to hear it. He could not play in the NFL. And because he had already signed with an agent, the NCAA would not let him back into college either. He was 21 and there was nowhere to play football. Denver drafted him 101st overall in 2005 anyway, then cut him in August before he played a single down. Then it got much worse. In January 2006 he was accused of armed robbery over a cell phone worth $150. In August 2006 police chased him down in Columbus and found a loaded AK-47 variant, two loaded handguns, swords and an open bottle of vodka in his car. He was wearing a Kevlar vest that stopped a Taser from working. On September 18, 2006, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven and a half years. Here is how he described sitting with that number. "I'm never going to be able to play football again. I'm thinking, I got seven and a half years. I'm 22. I'll be 30." So he did the thing he had never done. He learned to read. Really read. Comprehension, vocabulary, the whole thing, at 22 years old, in a cell at Toledo Correctional Institution. He worked through books on psychology and finance and started a distance learning program through Ohio University. He started a blog from prison. The line he used on it was this: "Understand my struggle so you can respect my hustle." He was granted early release on April 7, 2010, after about three and a half years. Now look at what he built with it. In 2016 he founded The Red Zone, a behavioral health agency in Youngstown, Ohio. Mental health services, addiction recovery, social work inside schools. He did not start a foundation with his name on a check. He started an agency that employs people and treats people. A 2018 report found that of 283 students served by The Red Zone, the average GPA went up 16.5%. In 2019 UConn brought him in as a consultant for their men's basketball program, and he mentored those players through back to back national championships. And in the 2024-25 season, Ohio State brought him back as a part-time mentor. They won the national championship. So Maurice Clarett has now been inside the building for national titles at two different schools, twenty years apart, in two different sports, as the man they bring in to talk to the players. Ryan Day on why he is there: his players benefit from "his honesty, leadership and care." Jim Tressel, who coached him in 2002, said his journey "exemplifies resilience, growth and serving others." This month, before Ohio State's season opener, the program had Maurice Clarett ring the Victory Bell at Ohio Stadium. The same building. Twenty-four years later. He is not a cautionary tale and he does not present himself as one. He talks about the depression and the drinking openly, because he runs an agency that treats both and he knows the work never actually ends. But understand what the man actually did. He won the biggest game in college football at 19 without being able to read the playbook properly. And then at 22, with seven and a half years in front of him, he sat down and taught himself.

In 1971, Alan Page became the first defensive player in the history of the National Football League to win Most Valuable Player. Not Defensive Player of the Year. MVP. The whole league. He weighed 240 pounds, which was small for a defensive tackle even then, and that season he put up 109 tackles, 35 assists, 10 sacks and three safeties. Then he went to law school while he was still playing. Page was born in Canton, Ohio, which is where the Pro Football Hall of Fame sits, and he ended up inside it in 1988. He played for the Minnesota Vikings from 1967 to 1978 and was one of the Purple People Eaters, the front four that terrified the NFL for a decade. Four Super Bowls. All-Pro every year from 1970 through 1977. Nine Pro Bowls. And then Minnesota released him in the middle of the 1978 season. Chicago picked him up. He played four more years for the Bears and retired in 1982. So he is one of the very few men who wore both of those uniforms. Here is what he was doing the whole time. Page enrolled at the University of Minnesota Law School while he was an active NFL player. He got his law degree in 1978, the same year he was still lining up on Sundays. In 1979 he went into private practice. In 1985 he joined the Minnesota attorney general's office. And in 1993, Alan Page was elected to the Minnesota Supreme Court. He served until 2015, when he hit the mandatory retirement age of 70. Twenty-two years as a justice on a state supreme court. Longer than his football career. In 2018 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor this country hands out. Now here is the part that should outlive all of it. In 1988, the same year he went into the Hall of Fame, Page and his wife started the Page Education Foundation. The first year they gave grants to ten students. The rule attached to the money is the whole idea. Page Scholars get between $2,500 and $3,500 a year. In exchange, they are required to go back and do service work with children. Every single year. You take the money, you go mentor a kid. He did not want to fund students. He wanted to build a chain. Since 1988 the foundation has supported more than 8,500 scholars and given out more than $17 million. More than 500 new Page Scholars are selected every year. So the ledger reads like this. First defensive player to win NFL MVP. Hall of Fame. Four Super Bowls. A law degree earned in the middle of all that. Twenty-two years on a state supreme court. The Presidential Medal of Freedom. And 8,500 kids who got tuition money on the condition that they go help somebody younger than them. He also writes children's books with his daughter Kamie. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap