SoMnFan
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Minnesota just had itself a hell of a week. First, it signed head coach P.J. Fleck to a contract extension just as the coaching carousel tried to swirl his name into rumors. Then, the Gophers went out and scored their biggest win in years (decades? ages?).
Granted, if a blue-blood school really wants to come after Fleck, an eight-figure buyout might not be enough to dissuade it. But assuming for now that the vultures will not circle and that he will remain Minnesota's coach moving forward, let's acknowledge just how perfect this marriage is.
At both Western Michigan and Minnesota, Fleck energetically burned the two-deep to the ground and installed his own recruits as quickly as possible, resulting in some early growing pains. His WMU tenure began with 14 losses in 17 games, then finished with 20 wins in 23. At Minnesota, he inherited a team coming off of its first nine-win season in 14 years but started out with an 8-11 record. With a ridiculously young two-deep, however, the Gophers won four of their last six last year, and they've needed only nine games to pull off another nine-win season this fall.
If Fleck were to at some point leave for a blue blood, things could get weird. He wants to build HIS depth chart with HIS culture and HIS weird mantras. He makes a given program Fleck University, and ... well ... blue bloods tend to have both a deep history and a set of boosters who like that history quite a bit. Fleck building his own culture from scratch could be met with resistance.
That's all the better for Minnesota, though. The Gophers program has a rich history, too, but most of its brightest moments happened in the 1930s and early 1940s. (Bernie Bierman: five-time national title winner and maybe the most underrated coach in college football history.) This team hasn't finished higher than 18th in the AP poll in 57 years. It was ripe for a top-to-bottom cultural overhaul, and Fleck has provided that.
Fleck is also proving he can build a winning brand of football -- that he can Row the Boat in the land of 10,000 lakes -- without dominating his conference in recruiting the way he did at WMU. He's building burly lines, running the ball as much as humanly possible, and winning just enough recruiting battles to assure high-level depth in the receiving corps and secondary. He's containing the game as mentor Jim Tressel did, and he has built a team capable of sniffing out mistakes and taking full advantage of them. Nothing about this is unsustainable.
While a CFP trip isn't all that likely, the Gophers now have, per SP+, a 75% chance of finishing with 11 or more wins (not including bowls). And that's with a depth chart that is awfully sophomore-heavy. This run might be just beginning.
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