At some point another step has to be taken.
I firmly believe that coaching college football is hard. Winning is harder. Winning consistently is…well I don’t know, I’ve never really experienced it as a Gopher fan. There is no formula that works and even when it appears you have things going in the right direction, there are bumps in the road.
I have also had a front-row seat to the rise and demise of a handful of Gopher coaching staffs. All but one of them (Sorry Tim, but there wasn’t much debate on this one) have had a period of great debate among fans about whether or not it is time to move on in a new direction.
That debate, for the first time with PJ Fleck, is rearing its ugly head within Gopher Nation. His team’s 2-2 start and loss to Iowa at home last week has stirred up the faithful.
Is it too early to seriously consider replacing PJ Fleck? Yes, I think it is way too early.
The Minnesota program has been stuck in mediocrity or worse for decades. Having finished just one season under .500 (excluding his first season, the one affectionately known as Year Zero), I don’t think we are nearly entitled enough to start firing coaches when they finish back-to-back seasons in the neighborhood of 5-7 (should we call this Mr. Frost’s Neighborhood?).
Is it fair to be incredibly frustrated and begin to ask some hard questions when the team has missed several opportunities to take a step beyond above average over the last four or five seasons? Yes, absolutely.
Following Minnesota’s loss to Iowa, here is what Fleck some of what he had to say,
“I love our team. I’m proud of the resolve, but we didn’t play well in the second half. And when you don’t play well, offense, defense, and special teams for 60 minutes with really good teams and the Big Ten the way it is, you’re going to get beat like that. Unacceptable, falls on me.”
He’s right. You are going to get beat like that when you come out in the 2nd half and get your ass kicked at the line of scrimmage. When you are helplessly watching the game and see that your defense has no prayer of stopping the opponent’s offense while your offense is incapable of moving the ball and answer the points. He is right, that does fall on him.
Again, it is fair to be frustrated, not because of this particular game, but because there is a pattern being established under Fleck. The Iowa second half was eerily similar to the North Carolina second half. It isn’t specifically about second-half adjustments, but it is a style of play that plays not to lose, instead of finding ways to win.
Playing games where you reduce your chances of losing is a different philosophy than playing games where you are trying to increase your chances of winning.
Playing “not to lose” has helped the program to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Examples are easy to come by…
- North Carolina 2024
- Northwestern 2023
- Illinois 2023
- Iowa 2022
- Bowling Green 2021
- Illinois 2021
- Iowa 2019
And there have been plenty of “near misses” as well. Miami (OH) in 2021, Fresno/SDSU/Georiga Southern/Purdue in 2020 are great examples.
Over the past 2+ seasons (2022, 2023 and the beginning of 2024) the Gophers are 6-5 in Big Ten games where they are the favored team (10-6 if you include 2021). Games as the underdog, they are 2-6, beating Wisconsin in ‘22 and Iowa in ‘23.
It has been two full seasons, going on a third, where Minnesota is slightly over .500 in Big Ten games where they are favored and winning just 25% of games as underdogs. The average point spread in games we were favored was -8.5 and as the underdog it was +6.5. This team consistently underperforms as the favorite, which happens when you play so as not to lose.
I get the philosophy. Reduce risks, take points when you can and do the little things you need to do to win the game. It is what Iowa does and has done well for years. The problem is that we make too many mistakes, over the last couple of seasons we have lacked some of the key fundamentals, have struggled at the line of scrimmage and on special teams. There is very little margin for error.
We haven’t been able to do the little things well enough and the record shows it.
PJ Fleck has done a lot of great things here in his 8th season with the Gophers. You cannot deny that 2019 was an elite year. After the Covid season, he put together back-to-back 9-win seasons. He technically has a Big Ten West championship. This program has excellent academic ratings, they have put more players in the NFL than at any point in decades and the floor seems to be raised to the point where a bad season results in a 5-7 record.
I believe that building a program like Minnesota into a consistent winner is hard and requires painful patience. These things truly take time and improvement is not a linear progression. But 2019 feels like a long time ago and there have been some huge missed opportunities in the seasons since that one. At some point, the time for talk is over and this program needs to occasionally punch above its weight class, instead of getting out-punched.
Fleck ended his Iowa post-game press conference with this,
“Don’t give up on this team. This team’s got a lot of football left, I promise you, and we’re going to give you everything we have moving forward. That second half, we’re going to learn from, I promise, and we’ll get that corrected.”
Again, the time for talking about this is over. The sarcastic calls for “changing your best” is over. The problem for Fleck is that apathy is creeping in and their next two opponents are not exactly playing in the same tier of the Big Ten as they are. Opportunity is there, will they open the door?