Absolutely correct.
I'm a Boomer, I remember the Holtz "era" fairly well. To my knowledge, the only person who sees any similarities between Holtz and Fleck is Reusse.
Fleck and Holtz are opposites in many ways, with different personalities and coaching styles. Fleck himself actually believes in what he's doing, in his slogans and the 'culture' he's building. He isn't trying to con or fool anyone. Reusse has always been way off base on that.
If you look at Reusse's complete history with Gopher football coaches, you can detect an obvious pattern:
— Reusse styled Holtz as "The Music Man". To a certain extent he was right about that.
— Reusse tried to portray Jerry Kill as some sort of a phony, pretend country boy. Pat never got any traction with that lame take.
— Now Reusse appears to be giving Fleck weird, backhanded compliments while drawing flimsy parallels between Fleck and Lou Holtz. Again, he's dredged up a slightly modified version of his worn-out 'con man' theme.
Patrick seems to want us to believe that it falls on him — in his role as the sage, world-weary columnist — to pry the scales from the eyes of us poor innocent yokels, who are too often fooled by the long parade of 'con men' hired as Gopher football coaches.
In point of fact, there have been good and bad and downright incompetent Gopher football coaches in my long life, but Lou Holtz is the only 'con man' in the bunch. Reusse is trying way too hard to recycle that bit.
