My beef with Fleck is that he thinks he can't be successful with the talent here.
The cupboard isn't as good as some, but it's not bare. This team, short handed,
with good coaching beat a (now #11) WSU team in the Holiday Bowl to go 9-4.
Fleck so far is more worried about 'changing the culture'. All fine but the culture outside
a couple really dumb decisions by a small few, was pretty good. Academics up, guys were
buying in and playing with heart. He needs to BUILD off that, not REbuild it...
Let's do a car analogy...
To win the Big Ten Auto Race, you need a car that can go about 120 MPH in a down year to a 200 MPH in a competitive year.
Tracy Claeys and Jerry Kill went and found some good 1960's muscle cars and fixed and fixed... next thing you know, we improved from 80 MPH, to 100 MPH, and last year we were running a 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS, bouncing right around 115 MPH fixing up those old muscle cars. Problem was, the engine needed to be replaced. New engine Claeys was looking at was something from a late 1970's car. He was never much fond of a Lotus, or a Honda S2000 because they weren't quite his style, and we certainly weren't going to afford a Ferrari.
Sure, Claeys maybe could have gotten that car running fast, but it wasn't looking good.
Fleck comes in and he sees a nice looking Chevelle, but his job is to compete to win Big Ten titles, not just run a competitive race and try to catch lighting in a bottle. All of the fans in the area really love the 1970 Chevy Chevelle we've had. We'd won some smaller racers with her, but we couldn't beat the Red Corvette next door.
Plus we put a lot of hard work into helping paint that Chevelle, we even spent time waxing her and won a auto show with her in late December.
Fleck comes in and looks at the car and thinks, "There's no way we'll beat Corvettes and Lamborghini's with this thing, but he can't say it because people will get offended that he's ripping on the car we worked so hard on.
So in turn, he needs to plug in a new engine, use the same transmission, but start changing out the other parts. He's added the aerodynamics of the rear half of his new car to the car, but the front end is still the same, and together it's not working good. It's not as fast as the car we ran last year.
So people ask, why did he decide to change the body on the car? Couldn't we have just won with the old body style and the replacement engine. Well, yes, maybe. Some would assume we'd win all of our races because the car was pretty fast last year and we got her really tuned in before we had to change engines. Not to mention, we were running such high RPM's on her last year, it appeared the whole thing might blow at one point.
But now he have this half and half car, and Fleck made that decision. If Fleck had decided to run the same car as last year, he wouldn't be getting the rear half of the body on the car, or be working to line up the new engine and front half of the car to match it.