MINNEAPOLIS — Sixteen months after getting hired at the nation’s sixth-largest campus, the former sixth-grade social studies teacher is talking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and how the New Deal brought this country out of the Great Depression.
He is talking about Winston Churchill, the British Bulldog, and how he saved London even after so many people had given up on him. He is talking about Gen. George Patton, and how he brought tank warfare to World War I.
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He is talking about Rosa Parks, about Gandhi, about Harriet Tubman — “It’s amazing what she did and the amount of successful trips she had on the underground railroad and how many times she was never caught. But the risk that she took to save other people …”
There are lessons about Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., about John F. Kennedy and Oprah Winfrey. Tutorials on Jackie Robinson and Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. There is even an explanation — amazingly, a necessary one — for why George Washington is on the wall that greets visitors inside this newly minted office.
“It’s amazing. The kids sit there and say: ‘Yeah, that’s the Geico commercial,’ ” P.J. Fleck says. “Nah, that’s our first president crossing the Delaware.”
Cue the eye-rolls from rival recruiters, the tsk-tsks from the traditionalists. In January, Fleck’s Minnesota program moved into the David and Janis Larson Football Performance Center, which comprises one-third of the school’s $166 million, 336,000-square foot Athletes Village. Literally, figuratively and financially, this complex is a far cry from the half-offices, half-luxury boxes inside Western Michigan’s Waldo Stadium that Fleck and his crew inhabited less than two years ago. (And those were actually impressive by Mid-American Conference standards.)
The second-youngest coach in the country wanted his new digs to project some of the same themes of his old ones. Instead of hand-slapped letters making up one of his favorite mottos — Who’s glad? How glad? Who’s mad? How mad? — Fleck had the creed plastered as part of a massive lamination facing him across from his desk. Long obsessed with presidents, he made a handful of them a part of this wall-sized mock-up, one that features pictures of those whom he calls 19 of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen, from all walks of life.
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His WMU office already had the feel of a junior-high classroom, so why not expand upon that? Personal and program accolades would be featured as they are practically everywhere else, sure, but how could he share his personal interests with the recruits and parents who are most likely to take note?
So in came the wall, which overlooks the couches and coffee table where visitors gather, allowing for question-and-answer sessions … and some curious exchanges.
“I always ask a recruit: ‘Tell me who’s on that wall,’ and it immediately gives you an insight into their life: What do they know? Who do they know? Who do they mix up?” Fleck says, before pointing to Robinson. “I’ve had some kids tell me that was Barry Bonds. You just don’t know their range of knowledge.
“This isn’t just about world history, where you have to know who exactly fought in the War of 1812; that’s not what I’m talking about. These are people who shaped the world that we are able to sit here (in) today as free Americans. It’s a powerful wall.”
There is another trait that links these 19 dignitaries, too: failure. Or rather, the lack of fear of failure. Fleck looks at kids today — at 37, he’s already twice the age of most of them, he’ll remind you — and sees a generation that has not been taught how to properly fail, which is another way of saying their growth has been stunted.
All of those world leaders staring back at them in their coach’s office? It took them awhile to get there. It took risk and resolve, in the face of backlash and bailing, all without the security afforded to 18- to 22-year-old college students, which might make the Minnesota football program’s five decades spent lingering around the bitter ZIP code of irrelevance trivial by comparison.
“This is a comfortable place. It’s a place that you can fail and grow,” Fleck says. “Now, the way we are and what we demand probably won’t be comfortable, because we’re changing all four areas of your life (academically, athletically, spiritually, socially). However, it’s a place that’s safe, that you’re gonna have the ability to grow the way you wanna grow.”
Rhys Lloyd sprinted across the Metrodome field in celebration, directly toward the visiting sideline. The kicker had just booted a 35-yard winner to slay Wisconsin for only the second time in nine years, and all he wanted to do now was grab Paul Bunyan’s Axe and share the prize with the home crowd. Taking in the scene from the front row that day in 2003 was a 17-year-old local receiver prospect who is now tasked with, among other duties, helping the Golden Gophers accomplish a feat they have failed to repeat since: Beat the Badgers.
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“Speaking of full circle …” Matt Simon says, laughing at the path his career has veered toward.
The 32-year-old now coaches Minnesota’s wideouts, in his sixth year as an FBS assistant after a standout career at Northern Illinois and a brief stint in the NFL. If that trajectory sounds familiar, look no further than the man who shaped him during his final two years near the cornfields of DeKalb: Fleck, then a grad assistant with the Huskies.
“I played in the National Football League because of him,” Simon says. “I was never the biggest or strongest or the fastest, but I worked hard and the things that he taught me positionally — but then just the mindset, too. I was kind of set from that point forward. Coaching is what I wanted to be able to do to help someone else out, turn around and achieve their dreams and aspirations.”
When Fleck arrived here in January 2017, the Gophers were coming off an off-the-field-inflicted black eye, with the program and administration engaged in a standoff over suspensions related to sexual assault allegations. He became their sixth head coach in a 12-year span, a comical amount of turnover for a program mired in mediocrity.
Minnesota averaged fewer than six wins a year in the 11 seasons prior, its shortcomings ranging from coaches who had one foot out the door to coaches who entered woefully unprepared. Jerry Kill had the program pointed upward with consecutive eight-win seasons, but health issues marred those good vibes.
Back Goldy retreated in this pro climate, an afterthought behind five other teams happy to plant their feet in the spotlight.
The 2017 season, Fleck’s first, was Minnesota’s 50th consecutive campaign without a Big Ten title, its 14th in row without beating the Badgers.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” junior linebacker and nearby Eden Prairie native Carter Coughlin says, “as a kid unfortunately at different times when I thought about Minnesota, it would be losing big games. And over the course of me growing up, we’d lose to different teams. Some years we’d beat them, some years it was a battle, some years we’d get blown out, some years we’d blow people out. There was just a lot of inconsistency with that.
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“But that’s completely changed, in my opinion, and although we only went 5-7 last year, that was Year 1, and just like anybody will tell you, Year 1 is the most difficult year. And now seeing our team last spring compared to this spring, it’s night and day. So I think Coach Fleck is bringing consistent energy that we see every single day, which makes us bring that energy to practice. And I think that’s why our team has grown the way we’ve grown.”
With his parents and his uncle having played a sport at the school, and with his grandfather having once served as its athletic director, Coughlin would take up an honor such as “Mr. Minnesota” on this roster if not for his roommate and fellow linebacker Thomas Barber, whose father and two brothers made their marks on the program before embarking on NFL careers.
Barber held off on committing for nearly a week after receiving his scholarship offer so he wouldn’t interfere with Coughlin’s moment in the sun the same day. Barber grew up watching the Gophers take the Governor’s Victory Bell from Penn State four consecutive times. He was a 6-year-old in the stands when his brother Marion won that ’03 Wisconsin game. And he was all of 8 when his brother Dom went into the Big House and helped Minnesota capture the Little Brown Jug against Michigan for the first time in 19 years.
He was a high school junior when the Gophers last took Floyd of Rosedale from Iowa in 2014, and entering his junior year, he says, “Just watching my brothers get those trophies, it’s just one of the things I strive for. I have not gotten one yet.”
Fortunately for Fleck, most teenagers are wired the way his linebacking duo is. What they might lack in understanding the context of the challenge ahead of them, they make up for by having grown up in a football world where “Row the Boat” is more than a nursery rhyme, where a mile-a-minute coach already has validation to his name through a remarkable rebuild in Kalamazoo.
This regime’s first full go-round netted the program its highest-rated recruiting class this decade (No. 37, per 247Sports Composite), and hearing its visionary speak — whether about his 1-11 debut campaign in the ’Zoo or about his analogy involving modern-day hip-hop — means hearing precious little talk of X’s and O’s.
“You’re always pulling from your past to create your future,” Fleck says. “There’s so much data here now that we’ve collected over the past 16 months that we’re doing it less. There’s still some things we bring up, yes. Will there always be things we bring up? Yes. But it’s not just Western Michigan. It’s when I played in the NFL. It’s when I coached in the NFL. It’s when I was at Rutgers, when I was a player. So you constantly bring up things, and I’ve said this all along: It’s my job to teach lifetime lessons in a cultural way.
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“So we can be talking about the Migos and Drake one day about (how) the Migos are all about culture, and they can understand the word ‘culture’ a little bit when associating it with Migos, and you can bring that into a team meeting somehow, some way because culturally they have to relate to you. Age-wise, they never will.”
A discernable buzz builds as coaches and players file into the Gophers’ 3 p.m. pre-practice meeting. Imagine Dragons’ “Whatever It Takes” plays in the background, a Michael Jordan quote on overcoming obstacles sits on the projector screen.
Up everyone stands and claps at exactly 2:55, the assembled team greeting Fleck as he enters the room. The scene is something short of Wolf of Wall Street, something more than your typical football team meeting. That becomes more and more evident as the head coach goes through slides and delivers his talking points for the day, his players’ attention firmly in his grasp.
There are the birthday wishes (and embarrassing pictures) for snapper Payton Jordahl and recruiting staffer Zach Bell. There is the announcement of the spring game moving up this week, from Saturday to Thursday, and an acknowledgement of how these players have earned the right to stage the game despite Mother Nature’s scheduled plans. Standout efforts from practice clips are highlighted, and players are quizzed on one of the program’s many acronyms — in today’s case, H.Y.P.R.R. (How. Yours. Process. Result. Response., for the uninitiated.)
Then Fleck shows examples from a number of walks of life that display what it means to respond strongly. The room comes to life when the lights dim and a cellphone clip, from the Fleck family getaway at the Great Wolf Lodge, plays on the screen. There, the Flecks are shown in a ballroom with other families when P.J.’s 8-year-old son, Carter, is challenged by a young girl to a dance-off. With a boa around her neck and moves to match her resolve, the challenger breaks it down. Emboldened, Carter answers. He dabs, he spins, he steps up to his competition. There is even an amateur worm thrown in, with the camera zooming out to reveal Carter’s bemused father making a face that in this setting is best described as meme-able.
“That’s response!” the coach says to the room, which has long since lost its collective mind.
For a moment, it is easy to forget that the majority of this roster is coming off a bowl-less season, a disappointment by most tangible measures. Cultural sustainability has been among Fleck’s many buzzwords, though, and that starts, as cliché as it sounds, by ignoring the scoreboard and the standings, by focusing on the process and the planting.
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“Everyone talks about these facilities and everything and how nice it’s gonna be for recruiting — true, no question,” Simon says. “But more importantly than that, the recruitment of our own players every single day, because let’s face it: It’s hard being a student-athlete. And so for us to be able to give back to them and recruit them on a daily basis to make sure that they understand how much we appreciate not just them, but the work they do, the things they do in the community, the things they’re doing in the classroom has been, to me, one of the most important parts of it.”
Coughlin appreciates the weekly leadership council meetings with Fleck, who always begins the sessions by asking the players what they need around the complex, be it new showerheads or more diverse protein shake options.
“The next day that’ll be done for us,” says Coughlin, Minnesota’s reigning sack leader who, after each of his 6.5 takedowns in 2017, had a chest-bump waiting for him on the sideline from his hyperkinetic head coach.
“It makes you wanna play for someone like that, you know?” he says.
This mammoth new building, which the administration commissioned even before it ponied up $3.5 million a year to land a coach coming off a Cotton Bowl berth, has not gone unnoticed by the players for whom it was tailored. And no detail is too small for the ever-meticulous coach who now takes up residence in its biggest office.
On his first day on the job, before he even had a news conference announcing his hiring, Fleck introduced himself to Jeff Keiser by putting his arm around him and telling the 17-year Minnesota employee that they were going to be best friends.
Keiser is Minnesota’s assistant AD for creative and services, and to say he has never worked for a head coach this involved in design would be akin to describing the Twin Cities as frigid. Fleck indoctrinated him into the meanings behind Row the Boat, H.Y.P.R.R. and the like, and together with creative director Niko Alexander, the trio got to developing artwork and concepts for the new facility.
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“To him, every wall and every place that somebody walks — every recruit, every player — there’s a reason for what he wants on that particular (wall),” Keiser says.
The coach’s focus is on storytelling, rather than simple highlighting. This type of environmental branding has led to walls in the structure being dedicated to Fleck-isms such as “Nekton Mentality” (always attack), “Prefontaine Pace” (with urgency) and “Farmers Alliance” (and with trust).
It also has led to that office wall, the one covered in heroes and innovators, an idea that started with the first president (in a boat, of course), took more than a week to fully expand (and to eventually whittle down) and finally was printed to vinyl and installed across a two-day span.
The place’s landlord offers no such timetable when it comes to the completion date of his prime renovation.
“We have to continue to get people seeing that this place is the hidden gem, it is a sleeping giant, because it is. We just have to be the ones to wake it up,” Fleck says. “And they have to be able to see that they are the one that can wake it up and do something that hasn’t been done in over half a century. And when you get to do that, that’s when people become legends, instead of just one of another — ‘Is that the 19th time or the 20th time that you just did that? I can’t remember. What number was he?’
“This is when they build statues of people and this is when they name things after people and this is when you’re unforgettable and you get put in that legendary status, if you can do something at a place that hasn’t done it in over a half-century.”
If — when? — that happens, there will be no mistaking at least one of the luminaries in the room the first time a teenager visits. Until then, though, there is plenty of failing to do, with plenty of nearby reminders, both good and bad, in picture and in person, of just how acceptable that is until there is none of it left to do.
(Top photo: Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)
