Fire Coyle, Fire Fleck! Rip the Band-Aid off!!!

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Texan Gopher said:
I was in high school and college in the '90s. Go ask chat GPT or co-pilot how many bowl games the Gophers made in the '90s.......

I will do it for you. Here is the answer....

Answer: The Minnesota Golden Gophers made one bowl game in the 1990s — the 1999 Sun Bowl.

I get the frustration. I am frustrated. It seems like we just can't take that next step. Even the year we finished in the top 10 we lost to our rivals. Trust me, I get the frustration.

That said, PJ is the best thing that's happened to this team. In the last 40 years. We make both games. We beat ranked teams. We win bowl games. We just can't seem to take the next step. And I'm starting to come to the realization that maybe we never will. Just be happy with above average.
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There were fewer bowl games and the conference was much tougher. The bowl games we have gone to sans ‘19 are nonsense.
 

For the record, despite all the Brewster bashing, he was getting us to the same tier of bowl as PJ, 2019 excepted. And Jeff Horton has as many wins over Ferentz as PJ (with Brewster's players).

I don't think PJ should be fired, but I wouldn't shed a tear if he left. We shouldn't be looking like buy game sacrificial lambs regardless of opponent, and this year that's happened 3 times now.
 

Bring back the Axe said:
For the record, despite all the Brewster bashing, he was getting us to the same tier of bowl as PJ, 2019 excepted. And Jeff Horton has as many wins over Ferentz as PJ (with Brewster's players).

I don't think PJ should be fired, but I wouldn't shed a tear if he left. We shouldn't be looking like buy game sacrificial lambs regardless of opponent, and this year that's happened 3 times now.
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Then provide the same money 💰
 

Gopherchase said:
LOL at all the folks here that think this is the Golden Age. I’d say we deserve this garbage football but I don’t think most fans on the street agree with the Fleck bobos.
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Most "fans" on the street know nothing about college sports and it's funding.
 



caliGopher said:
FIFY

This would be a more interesting discussion, but pointless.

Fleck is our coach. He will be unless or until he continues to lose his composure on the sidelines and punches a ref, or he chooses to leave. I thnk there needs to be more accountability for him in more than words, but we need a competent AD to manage that, we don't have one of those. And an admin that can see the value of sports at the U without putting it into the succeed at all costs stratosphere.
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Accountibility should mean the AD convening (this) Monday morning, meetings with Fleck/OC/DC & entire the entire hockey staff to discuss expectations for the rest of the season. Per football—a passionate & prepared effort against Northwestern is a non-negotiable—in light of the road game humiliations. The word should come from the top.
 


Gopherchase said:
LOL at all the folks here that think this is the Golden Age. I’d say we deserve this garbage football but I don’t think most fans on the street agree with the Fleck bobos.
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The problem is there’s only a few hundred fans on those streets
 

Stuff said:
I have been highly critical of PJ myself, but I don't want to see him get fired. There is a 90% chance the next coach could be a Brewster/Fickell and about a .1% we get a Cignetti. Anything else in between will be another Fleck level coach.

I will say with Fleck, he needs to have good a good OC & DC in place to be successful.

I think he has recruited solid athletes and high character people to the program, but we need a OC & DC to make them successful.
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Agree. One very realistic change would be for Coyle to cough up significantly more dollars for top line OC and DC who come in understanding that the goal is to design schemes for a largely developmental class of recruits to play well above their nominal expected wins. That can be done, and doesn't require massive infusions of NIL. PJ already squeezes more than nominally expected wins out of his recruiting classes; for the Gophers to improve further, PJ has to squeeze a couple more wins out that are further above expectation based on recruits. That is really, really hard unless you find a bunch of hidden, non-developmental gems who came to the Gophers because the ratings agencies dramatically undervalued then (think Antoine Winfield, who ranked lower than anyone in our pending 2026 class; Mo Ibrahim is another example) OR your coordinators use creative and deceptive schemes to outhink/confuse opponents, complicated schemes that can be mastered by your own team. This how MAC teams αnd NDSU often play head-to-head with P4 opponents. (How often have we heard from PJ of such teams, "They did some things we didn't expect"). Assuming the Gophs recruit wisely within their NIL budget, to move up the ladder from today I believe the Gophs need a special kind of OC and DC. Not just experienced guys, but highly-creative guys who instinctively live in and embrace the "do more with less" world. And those guys, like Parker at Iowa, cost money. Not NIL money, University budget money.
 



Ewert86PC said:
Most of the UMN connected businesses have been sold or are controlled by outside Minnesota corporations. The Cargills won't touch UMN for some reason. Curt Carlson's family has stopped caring about anything that doesn't bear the patriarchs name. The Casino funded people won't give because their aggitators believe the UMN is on their land.

The anarchists and hippies from the 1960s have succeeded in turning UMN into a money-repulsing school. It's not just athletically. Look at how effed the medical school is now that they want to separate from Fairview.

UMN has been fiscally mismanaged since the 1980s when they realized cuts needed to be made and the refusal to court large endowment gifts in the 50s and 60s was a bad idea.

UMN has never understood the need to have a self-sufficiency streak because they have tried too hard to exploit the land grant status of the school, relying too heavily on state funding and the political whims of the Twin Cities.

If you go out of the metropolitan region of Minneapolis & Saint Paul and talk to people, you will find that UMN has developed a generations deep distrust and even dislike, bordering on hatred, of UMN.

The outstate region is where losing sports teams mattered because that is where state pride really sits. Losing UMN teams was just another slap in the face to rural Minnesotans. Even the rise of the MNSCU (Mankato State, Bemidji State, Saint Cloud State, et al) system has been bolstered, in part, due to successful athletic programs.

TL;DR, the hippies and beatniks took power at UMN and are effing it up. No one wants to give money and they can't unseat that mentality.
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I think you are being unfair to the beatniks. If Wisconsin and Michigan can have so much more athletic success even being run by hippies and beatniks there's no reason Minnesota cannot.

It's about the school investing in sports and making it a priority. Wisconsin and Michigan would still be great universities with bad sports teams. Look at Cal. No one disputes that Cal is one of the best universities on the planet.

People will overlook the hippies and beatniks if sports teams win. Michigan in reality has a few dozen big contributors and thousands of medium-sized contributors. Michigan does not need the entire Detroit business community supporting them. Wisconsin is not dependent on the Milwaukee business community.
 

Some Day...Maybe said:
Who would you rather have?
Fleck or Kill?
Fleck or Brewster?
Fleck or Mason?
Fleck or Gutekunst?
Fleck or Wacker?
Fleck or Holtz? (for 2 yrs)
Fleck or Salem?
Fleck or Stoll?

I’ll take Fleck over all the above. That spans over half a century of The University of Minnesota football. I’m sure the next guy will be better though. History says he will, right?
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Piss poor support and decisions from Mn admin. It's that simple.
 

masswood said:
Looking at the big ten, the gophers ,putting records aside ,might be the worst team in the big ten. Their 6 win total so far is deceiving. This Honestly is one of flecks worst teams, especially on the defensive side.
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last night was bad, tosu and Iowa were too; but idk if that’s a great excuse to make shit up about the realities of the conference.
 

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GopherVotary said:
We need to recruit talented players unconcerned with money. It shouldn’t be difficult.
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We've already got lots of talented players. Lots of them. That's not the issue for a team like the Gophers, that is already regularly producing winning seasons. To move further up the food chain, the Gophers need a more of the most highly talented players in the game (watch the Oregon game again to see what they look like). The most highly talented players across the entire college football spectrum--maybe 100 to 150 in any given season--exist in an ecosystem that is literally awash in money. Many of the most highly talented players come from impoverished or low-income backgrounds and are justifiably focused on getting every penny of their fair share of that money. I grant that there will always be a few players who ignore offers of bigger money when choosing their school (mostly kids who stay home to be hometown heroes), but those players are, I believe, very few in number, and have 100 schools with limited NIL dollars scrapping for them. As the football standings prove every year, it is actually immensely difficult, perhaps impossible, to find much less "get" a bunch of the most highly talented players who are happy to play for far below than their market value.

My disappointment with PJ's teams isn't about his winning record. This year's team is probably a 7 or 8 win team and should get there. It is about how unprepared this year's team is to compete against top ranked foes, and how difficult it is for the team to secure a convincing win in toss-up games. This I lay at the feet of the Coordinators. They've need to get better at fighting with the army they've got. In the past, PJ has been lucky enough to have some coordinators who truly did more with less. {Kill did, too: think Claeys as DC}. This year's coordinators actually have some top talent at a few positions (PJ says this is his best team), yet in most games the Gophs appear to be playing below or at best somewhere around their nominal talent level. Except for the Nebraska game (and even a blind squirrel sometimes finds an acorn), it seems we haven't had games in which the Gophers played above inspired, played above their nominal expected level of play based on talent.
 




Until Mn administration decides to go all in, this will be the result.
 



BarnBurner said:
Funding athletics at a level that will allow Mn to compete with Oregon in football, for example.

Compare and contrast Mn and Oregon players and coaching.
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We offer the full number of scholarships available, and are paying the full allowable rev sharing. Same as Oregon. So coaching salaries would be the primary area that you think the administration needs to step up?
 

GopherVotary said:
We need to recruit talented players unconcerned with money. It shouldn’t be difficult.
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Lol. Lol. Yeah, that's what Oregon and OSU do. Yeah, that's why the SEC was good for so long. Lol
 


LeftofThaDial said:
We offer the full number of scholarships available, and are paying the full allowable rev sharing. Same as Oregon. So coaching salaries would be the primary area that you think the administration needs to step up?
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Now add nil.
 


Here's the raw facts: During the Mason years, the program suffered because they were so low on the revenue list that they were doing all they could to compete. And, they did ok. Now, since NIL, you are either one of the few schools that can load up on heavy dollars to field what is basically a professional team, or you are operating close to the traditional rules of college football. I just don't think the will will every be there to fund this thing the way other schools are WILLING to. That's the key, and its endemic to Minnesota. I accepted this a while back, so I'm happy for whatever level of success they achieve. That gap is only going to widen.
 

BarnBurner said:
Funding athletics at a level that will allow Mn to compete with Oregon in football, for example.

Compare and contrast Mn and Oregon players and coaching.
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Oregon players are paid by Phil Knight. Who is doing that for MN?
 

LeftofThaDial said:
Yes I’m aware of what NIL is. It’s not paid by the administration.
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Yes, I'm aware it's not paid by the administration.

Tell me how Mn and Mark Coyle handled nil from inception compared to blue bloods.
 

mngolf said:
Oregon players are paid by Phil Knight. Who is doing that for MN?
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That's the point. Until Mn has $$$$$$$$$, the results will be the same.

And... until Mn administration decides to go all in, same.

Decades of poor support and decisions. The evidence is overwhelming.
 


This is 100% about money. This is not like Wisconsin deciding to invest in the program in the Alvarez era. That might as well be 1950 at this point. Sure, getting some better paid coordinators would help, but it's players we need. Teams that can't invest in paying players are going to continue to fall behind. (and Wisconsin doesn't have very good NIL either).

Where the lack of investment for decades hurts is we didn't build a strong fan base who will pony up to pay for a good team (or an administration that will fund NIL under the table). And most notably, we don't have any singular whales who are mega-fans and will bankroll the team. Texas Tech has what, a $50 million payroll for football players?

The Gophers are right where they would be expected to be. They've won the games they were expected to (except Cal) and lost the games they were expected to (except Nebraska).
 

LeftofThaDial said:
Yes I’m aware of what NIL is. It’s not paid by the administration.
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Not here it's not. I'd be shocked if there aren't schools paying NIL under the table since there's no real enforcement.
 

disco said:
This is 100% about money. This is not like Wisconsin deciding to invest in the program in the Alvarez era. That might as well be 1950 at this point. Sure, getting some better paid coordinators would help, but it's players we need. Teams that can't invest in paying players are going to continue to fall behind. (and Wisconsin doesn't have very good NIL either).

Where the lack of investment for decades hurts is we didn't build a strong fan base who will pony up to pay for a good team (or an administration that will fund NIL under the table). And most notably, we don't have any singular whales who are mega-fans and will bankroll the team. Texas Tech has what, a $50 million payroll for football players?

The Gophers are right where they would be expected to be. They've won the games they were expected to (except Cal) and lost the games they were expected to (except Nebraska).
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That’s a cop out. We are landing better recruits under Fleck than we ever have. The results have not translated onto the field. That has nothing to do with money. Q
 

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