The Chicago White Sox had fired Harry Caray and replaced him with Joe McConnell as the lead play-by-play announcer. The crosstown Cubs soon announced they would be hiring Caray to join their broadcast team.

Harry ridiculed the White Sox decision thusly: “Joe McConnell could not sell you an ice-cold Budweiser if you were crawling across the desert, about to die of thirst.”

Too bad Harry isn’t still with us and covering Big Ten football. He would look at Minnesota’s situation and say: “Glen Mason could not sell a football program if he had Notre Dame’s tradition to work with.”

The Gophers finish the regular season Saturday at Wisconsin, then use the victories from a fraudulent nonconference schedule to advance to an unimportant bowl game.

Mason, coach at Kansas University from 1988-96, will try to take bows for this before the fact, then will disappear from the public consciousness until the fourth week of September, when the Gophers are getting ready to play Penn State in the 2003 Big Ten opener.

No coach has ever made Gophers’ football so easy to cover for the Twin Cities media. Mason acts as if news on his team are leaks, not topics of conversation that might help build interest for an upcoming game.

Jim Wacker, Mason’s predecessor, was 16-39 in five seasons. That made him the worst coach in Gophers’ history. Yet, Wacker was able to get more attention focused on his team during the season ” and particularly in the long offseason ” than has Mason.

It’s arrogance, not laziness, that prevents Mason from energetically selling his product in this competitive sports market. The guy acts as if he’s Woody Hayes, coaching the No. 1 game in Columbus, Ohio, rather than running a football team that has been an impoverished cousin to its NFL counterpart for 35 years.

This smugness is astounding when you consider Mason’s minor level of accomplishment here. He has proven he’s a better coach than Wacker. Doesn’t that get your heart pumping and your corpuscles jumping, sports consumers?

In addition to having the P.R. skills of Bud Selig, there is evidence Mason is also mediocre at the main task ” coaching football players.

His spiel from the get-go this season was that he had a young team. Those teams are supposed to get better, right?

Mason’s team has gotten worse. Yes, the competition has been tough in this three-game losing streak ” Ohio State, Michigan, Iowa – but his team never did compete for a full four quarters in those losses.

There is nothing new about this. In five of Mason’s six seasons, the Gophers have been losers in the Big Ten’s stretch drive.

In Mason’s six seasons, the Gophers are 17-3 against the nonconference pastry. They are 10-14 on the front end of the Big Ten schedule, and they are 7-16 down the stretch.

Earle Bruce, an old Ohio State coach, once said, “October is for pretenders; November is for contenders.”

Mason is 7-12 in November.

No matter what happens in Madison, another Chicago icon – Bob Verdi, formerly of the Chicago Tribune – once offered an epitaph on a Bears’ season that would summarize perfectly Mason’s sixth year in Minnesota:

“The (Bears/Gophers) did not beat a good team this season, including the games in which they beat themselves.”