Another Twins collapse + Jay Paterno on the future of college sports

First, though, what did I miss? Let's take a minute here to just talk about how disappointing the end of this Twins season has been.

A feel-good story for a lot of the year.

Yes, they were propped up by a bad American League, a squishy middle of the American League that kept them in a wildcard race for a lot longer than they deserve, but bottom line is they were fun to watch for four months this season.

They were maybe overachieving a little bit, end of July, 56 and 55, right there in that third wildcard spot mix, you know, right there, um, only a few games back even in the division race at that point at 56 and 55.

14 and 26 since then, including another loss to the Yankees yesterday.

70 and 81 overall.

They cannot finish with a winning record even if they win their final 11 games this season.

Listen, when you start to fall out of a race, this happens.

You start playing the younger players, you start losing interest in winning.

It doesn't become as important.

The games start to slip a little bit, and if you're giving 5 or 10% less, which I'm not saying effort-wise they're doing, but if you're into it less, if you care less about winning, which is only natural when your seasi- uh, season is concluding, this tends to happen.

But it tends to happen way too much with the Twins.

This is exactly what happened last year.

Even though they added a ton of players at the deadline this year, they went and reinforced the bullpen, they got some starting pitching.

They said, "Hey, you know what? We're not the world's greatest team.

We maybe don't have World Series aspirations this year, but we've got a chance.

We've got a chance to make the playoffs.

We're right there, so let's, let's go for it to a degree." And what's happened since then is they've fallen flat on their faces.

14 and 26 since the end of July.

Utterly unacceptable, utterly disappointing.

What, what a, just what a bummer, right? Like, this was a fun year until the last six weeks.

It just feels like the same thing over and over again.

Which does lead me to one thing I would do.

Joe Ryan is not to blame for all of this, obviously.

When a team collapses like this repeatedly, it is a multiplayer, organization-wide effort to a large degree.