Minnesota football coach Glen Mason doesn’t read the positive letters and e-mails sent his way. He does, however, squint at the correspondence that isn’t all that flattering.

“They tell me I should be fired or castrated,” Mason said.

His team is 7-1, and they’re calling for his head and other body parts?

“I got negative stuff after we lost to Purdue,” Mason said.

With victories in every other game, the negative stuff has been kept to a minimum. He could just about eliminate it entirely if the Gophers beat Ohio State on Saturday in Columbus.

“Ohio State is good, I can tell you that,” said Mason who coached at Kansas University from 1988 to 1996.

Anyone could have told us that. Tell us something else.

Tell us what it would mean to beat Ohio State and then win your next three games. Tell us what it would mean to finish the season 11-1. Come on, do some looking ahead for us.

“I am looking ahead to Saturday,” Mason said. “That’s as far as I can see. My binoculars don’t see any farther than that.”

He doesn’t want to get into the possibilities of what could happen should the Gophers beat Ohio State. So we’ll do it for him. If the Gophers beat Ohio State and win their final three regular-season games, they will go to the Rose Bowl. There are no ifs, ands or Buckeyes about it.

Of course, winning four games in a row would mean beating Ohio State, 15th-ranked Michigan, No. 9 Iowa and a pesky Wisconsin team.

“And by the time we play Wisconsin, they’ll be ranked,” Mason said. “For all the crap I took about our early-season schedule, who’s got a tougher schedule in November?”

Uh, probably nobody. These last four teams have a combined record of 29-6. As for the Gophers’ first eight opponents, they’re 22-44 overall.

“All I know is we’ve got a tough row,” Mason said. “We have a tough row and a tough road. You can take your choice.”

Speaking of choices, many people have been choosing lately to tell Mason he must be ecstatic.

“I say, ‘Why?’ ” Mason said. “They say, ‘Because you’re 7-1.’ I say, ‘I never look at it like that.’ It comes from what I do for a living. I have very short vision.”

When you’re playing a 9-0 team such as the Buckeyes, short vision probably is the way to go. This is an enormous game for the Gophers. Biggest one they’ve played this late in the season in four decades. It’s even bigger when you factor in that Mason played at Ohio State and wanted to coach there.

Right, coach? That is right, isn’t it?

“Most people assume it means more personally to me than it really does,” Mason said. “It’s not the first time I’ve played against Ohio State. There’s not any more on the line than any other year.”

We beg to differ. For one thing, if the Gophers beat the Buckeyes, they will make a dramatic climb in the national rankings from their spot at No. 23.

For another thing, it doesn’t hurt when you’re recruiting a high school kid to tell him you knocked off the Buckeyes when they were sixth-ranked and undefeated.