None of us will EVER know the exact absolute full story/whole truth, all any of us can do is speculate. Well, here is my attempt to decipher what happened.
Fleck is a HUGE personality kind of person. His assistant coaches are always going to have to live in his shadow. If Minnesota wins a B1G conf title and/or a Natl Title, who will get the vast majority of the credit? The assistant coaches? lol No way, Fleck will get a friggin Statue erected in his honor, and his assistants, if they don't all go and take head coaching jobs the next season, will get SOME, a small amount of praise, from US, the diehards on GH, but the vast majority of the public, all the bandwagoners, will see only Fleck, Fleck this, Fleck that, Fleck, Fleck, Fleck....
Minnesota has not been considered a place where a coach can succeed at the highest level, so any coach who does do that, will be seen as a superhero.
So, why not go to a program where the coach has been there for a long enough period, that you can say, why hasn't he gotten his program up to the point of being even with OSU yet? What is missing? What is he doing wrong? Well, in comes a new coordinator, and then PSU beats OSU in 2020 or 2021 and MAYBE, just maybe, some of the right people will credit the new coordinator, as much as or more than the Head Coach who didn't do it before that coordinator showed up? Then that coordinator starts getting calls from not only schools wanting head coaches, but the NFL.
There, that is my theory. No need for there to be bad blood, although maybe there is some, maybe like all breakups, some misplaced words or something said that wasn't said absolutely perfectly, was misunderstood? Maybe Fleck feels a little betrayed? People with larger than life personalities sometimes don't understand how someone else might not want to be just a loyal follower. So I'm saying he just didn't want to live in Fleck's very large and overreaching shadow. My guess is we are going to go through a lot of coordinators in the coming years. UMn will become a revolving door of new coordinators all wanting to learn from the master, and then move on to places where their light can maybe shine a little brigher and not be totally absorbed and overshadowed by The MAN, The Personality, THE FLECK.
Doesn't Saban go through a lot of coordinators, too? I take this as a positive, totally.
Another aspect, alot of us, before the medical problems kicked in and overshadowed what he had going on here, started to like Kill and his brick by brick thing. And Kill had some guys on his staff that had been with him for decades. Kill was NOT a huge personality, he was a much softer spoken guy, he was a builder and took more time building. His lower key personality needed more time. Fleck enters a living room and wows some parents and their son/the recruit. Kill? Not so much. But both were/are respected throughout the coaching ranks while they were/are coaching here. So we went from having a low key coach who garnered long time, even lifetime loyalty you could argue, from his staff. Granted once reaching the P5 level, that may have changed. Very few schools went looking for NIU assistants to fill head coaching positions, much less the schools he coached before NIU, and the ones who did, probably didn't offer much more than they were making working for Kill, so... my point being, we went from a low key coach, with a staff that had more experience/years working for Kill, than any other coaching staff in the country. I know, I remember bragging about that fact to some non-Gopher fans. To now we have a very high energy coach, who is and will always be the center of attention, the focus of the program. So maybe having Kill and his loyal bunch of assistants for those years, got us used to thinking that is how things just are. But that is NOT how they are. Guys like Kill can keep assistants around. Had he not had his health issues, and started having more and more success here, going from 8 wins seasons, to 9 and 10 and 11 win seasons, the loyalty of those assistants would finally have been truly tested, and even Kill would have lost all of his assistants over time, I'm pretty sure. Or if not because other schools stole them away, maybe because in time fans would recognize that they needed to be upgraded to get beyond that 9-11 game win level? But with Fleck getting us to 11 wins in just his 3rd season, and his getting most of the credit, of course his assistants are going to want to go elsewhere, we should strap ourselves in for a wild ride and get used to assistants coming and in for a year or two, 3 at the most, and then bolting for greener pastures. And the whole "chance to win a Natl Title" thing? lol He was just kissing his new bosses arse is all that is. Maybe trying to take some of the shine off of Fleck, but hey, that will just make Fleck look THAT MUCH BETTER when he gets UMN another Title before PSU gets another!!!!