BleedGopher
Well-known member
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2008
- Messages
- 60,698
- Reaction score
- 15,935
- Points
- 113
Big SI Q&A: P.J. Fleck begins upstream endeavor bringing 'Row The Boat' mantra to MN
per Thamel:
P.J. Fleck remains one of the most captivating characters in college football. He ambushed the sport’s consciousness last season by leading Western Michigan to the Cotton Bowl with an undefeated regular season and a MAC championship. Fleck got hired at Minnesota in January, bringing his high-energy “Row The Boat” philosophy to Minneapolis. The early returns include an adrenaline spike in relevancy to the traditionally milquetoast Gophers program, which includes a 2018 recruiting class ranked in the top 20 by all three major services.
Fleck recently sat down with Sports Illustrated to talk about the Gophers’ cultural overhaul, his post-spring thoughts on their talent, former Western Michigan star Corey Davis’s NFL future and how other Big Ten coaches have received him.
SI: Your program and philosophies are undeniably unique. Not everyone bought in immediately at Western Michigan. How’s the buy-in been so far at Minnesota?
P.J. Fleck: I’m really proud of our football team because I don’t think we have a lot of guys that aren’t in the boat. I give these guys a lot of credit. They haven’t asked a ton of questions, they just rowed, and that’s what we’ve kinda asked them and demanded them to do. Just row and watch what the culture can do for you because everything they’re doing is for the first time. Winter conditioning, first time. How we do it, where we do it, what corner of the end zone we do it, where their position meetings are, everything is new. Spring ball, same thing. Now we’re transitioning into summer where it really becomes a players’ team for a while, and you know, I’m really proud of the transition they’ve had. We’ve had some that probably don’t fit the new culture, but with every cultural change, that happens.
SI: I’m curious after your experience overhauling Western Michigan how long you think cultural overhauls usually take?
PF: I think it takes about two years. We’ve had three head coaches at the University of Minnesota in three years, and I don’t blame a lot of the guys that might be on the fence. There might be seniors and juniors and upperclassmen saying, “I don’t know, I gotta do this again?” It’s not their fault, but that’s the biggest question. I think it takes two years because the upperclassmen that have been through coaching changes before know what the positives are of that, know what the negatives are of that. They’ve got to learn all new systems again. So I think it takes two years to transition, two years of recruiting, two years of development, so players go back through the circuit season winter conditioning, spring ball. Once they get it once and go through it again, I think that whole full circuit, that second full circuit, you see a big change in the culture and moving forward.
SI: So much of turning around a program is leadership from the players. How’s that developed so far at Minnesota?
PF: We have a saying we brought from Western Michigan: Bad teams, nobody leads; average teams, the coaches lead; and elite teams, players lead. We went from nobody leading at all to having some leaders, and I think that’s the biggest transition we’re making is getting this team to be player-led at some point, whether it’s this year, next year, or five years down the road. That’s what we had at Western Michigan. The minute those players took over and dominated and became the culture, that’s when we had incredible success. I still think we’re a long way away from that, but that’s the biggest part. People always talk about, “O.K., the ‘Row The Boat’ culture or this coaching staff culture,” but we had a discussion with the players the other day. When it becomes your culture, that’s when it changes. It’s not my culture. It’s your culture and that’s the next transition we have on the field. Because it’s not what we do, its how we do it.
SI: Now that spring is over and you’ve seen what you have, what should we expect from Minnesota on the field this year?
PF: We’re a 4–3 scheme, but we don’t have enough 4–3 personnel. We don’t have a freshman, sophomore and we only have one junior defensive tackle on the entire roster. We only have eight total offensive linemen. We don’t have enough defensive linemen to play a 4–3, but we’re very deep at the linebacker position. So what we’re going to do is take some of our best linebackers and turn them into defensive linemen this year and turn it into a 3–4 type scheme, a lot more of a nickel-type base. Antoine Winfield, one of our best players, is going to have to play a more glorified SAM linebacker in space. We’re going to be very creative, which we’ve learned coming from the Greg Schiano pipeline. [Defensive coordinator Robb Smith worked under Schiano at Rutgers and remains close to him.]
SI: What about the offense?
PF: Offensively, we don’t even know who our quarterback will be. We only had four offensive linemen that were really healthy for most of the spring. We don’t have a wideout on our roster that caught more than 18 passes in his career. We don’t have a quarterback that’s played more than one game. What we do have is Kirk Ciarrocca, and he’s really good at making sure the players can have success at what they do. We want them to play fast, whether we’re very complex, very simple, it’s just on how much our players can handle. We do have two very talented running backs [Rodney Smith and Shannon Brooks], and we always love our inside zone. That’s what we are, and that will never go away. And we’re gonna rely on our play-action pass. How evolved we get from that is how much our kids can pick up and how much the quarterback can handle.
SI: You’ve got a lot of great momentum on the recruiting trail. You obviously had a lot of success recruiting at Western Michigan to build that program. What’s it been like so far at Minnesota?
PF: When you take over a program, I think the most important recruiting class you have is the first full recruiting class, and the second is the next. For us, the 2018 and 2019 classes are the two most important classes of our tenure at the University of Minnesota. We have to attack 2018 because a lot of those guys are going to have to start, are going to have to play, are going to have to be major impact players as freshmen. That’s why we’re having so much success. People can feel like they can come to the University of Minnesota. We have one of the best facilities in the whole country being built that will open, we have the best public institutions in the country. When people start seeing that, you’re not doing it in a Group of Five school, you’re a Power 5 school in one of the best conferences in the country.
https://www.si.com/college-football/2017/05/23/pj-fleck-minnesota-gophers-preview
Go Gophers!!
per Thamel:
P.J. Fleck remains one of the most captivating characters in college football. He ambushed the sport’s consciousness last season by leading Western Michigan to the Cotton Bowl with an undefeated regular season and a MAC championship. Fleck got hired at Minnesota in January, bringing his high-energy “Row The Boat” philosophy to Minneapolis. The early returns include an adrenaline spike in relevancy to the traditionally milquetoast Gophers program, which includes a 2018 recruiting class ranked in the top 20 by all three major services.
Fleck recently sat down with Sports Illustrated to talk about the Gophers’ cultural overhaul, his post-spring thoughts on their talent, former Western Michigan star Corey Davis’s NFL future and how other Big Ten coaches have received him.
SI: Your program and philosophies are undeniably unique. Not everyone bought in immediately at Western Michigan. How’s the buy-in been so far at Minnesota?
P.J. Fleck: I’m really proud of our football team because I don’t think we have a lot of guys that aren’t in the boat. I give these guys a lot of credit. They haven’t asked a ton of questions, they just rowed, and that’s what we’ve kinda asked them and demanded them to do. Just row and watch what the culture can do for you because everything they’re doing is for the first time. Winter conditioning, first time. How we do it, where we do it, what corner of the end zone we do it, where their position meetings are, everything is new. Spring ball, same thing. Now we’re transitioning into summer where it really becomes a players’ team for a while, and you know, I’m really proud of the transition they’ve had. We’ve had some that probably don’t fit the new culture, but with every cultural change, that happens.
SI: I’m curious after your experience overhauling Western Michigan how long you think cultural overhauls usually take?
PF: I think it takes about two years. We’ve had three head coaches at the University of Minnesota in three years, and I don’t blame a lot of the guys that might be on the fence. There might be seniors and juniors and upperclassmen saying, “I don’t know, I gotta do this again?” It’s not their fault, but that’s the biggest question. I think it takes two years because the upperclassmen that have been through coaching changes before know what the positives are of that, know what the negatives are of that. They’ve got to learn all new systems again. So I think it takes two years to transition, two years of recruiting, two years of development, so players go back through the circuit season winter conditioning, spring ball. Once they get it once and go through it again, I think that whole full circuit, that second full circuit, you see a big change in the culture and moving forward.
SI: So much of turning around a program is leadership from the players. How’s that developed so far at Minnesota?
PF: We have a saying we brought from Western Michigan: Bad teams, nobody leads; average teams, the coaches lead; and elite teams, players lead. We went from nobody leading at all to having some leaders, and I think that’s the biggest transition we’re making is getting this team to be player-led at some point, whether it’s this year, next year, or five years down the road. That’s what we had at Western Michigan. The minute those players took over and dominated and became the culture, that’s when we had incredible success. I still think we’re a long way away from that, but that’s the biggest part. People always talk about, “O.K., the ‘Row The Boat’ culture or this coaching staff culture,” but we had a discussion with the players the other day. When it becomes your culture, that’s when it changes. It’s not my culture. It’s your culture and that’s the next transition we have on the field. Because it’s not what we do, its how we do it.
SI: Now that spring is over and you’ve seen what you have, what should we expect from Minnesota on the field this year?
PF: We’re a 4–3 scheme, but we don’t have enough 4–3 personnel. We don’t have a freshman, sophomore and we only have one junior defensive tackle on the entire roster. We only have eight total offensive linemen. We don’t have enough defensive linemen to play a 4–3, but we’re very deep at the linebacker position. So what we’re going to do is take some of our best linebackers and turn them into defensive linemen this year and turn it into a 3–4 type scheme, a lot more of a nickel-type base. Antoine Winfield, one of our best players, is going to have to play a more glorified SAM linebacker in space. We’re going to be very creative, which we’ve learned coming from the Greg Schiano pipeline. [Defensive coordinator Robb Smith worked under Schiano at Rutgers and remains close to him.]
SI: What about the offense?
PF: Offensively, we don’t even know who our quarterback will be. We only had four offensive linemen that were really healthy for most of the spring. We don’t have a wideout on our roster that caught more than 18 passes in his career. We don’t have a quarterback that’s played more than one game. What we do have is Kirk Ciarrocca, and he’s really good at making sure the players can have success at what they do. We want them to play fast, whether we’re very complex, very simple, it’s just on how much our players can handle. We do have two very talented running backs [Rodney Smith and Shannon Brooks], and we always love our inside zone. That’s what we are, and that will never go away. And we’re gonna rely on our play-action pass. How evolved we get from that is how much our kids can pick up and how much the quarterback can handle.
SI: You’ve got a lot of great momentum on the recruiting trail. You obviously had a lot of success recruiting at Western Michigan to build that program. What’s it been like so far at Minnesota?
PF: When you take over a program, I think the most important recruiting class you have is the first full recruiting class, and the second is the next. For us, the 2018 and 2019 classes are the two most important classes of our tenure at the University of Minnesota. We have to attack 2018 because a lot of those guys are going to have to start, are going to have to play, are going to have to be major impact players as freshmen. That’s why we’re having so much success. People can feel like they can come to the University of Minnesota. We have one of the best facilities in the whole country being built that will open, we have the best public institutions in the country. When people start seeing that, you’re not doing it in a Group of Five school, you’re a Power 5 school in one of the best conferences in the country.
https://www.si.com/college-football/2017/05/23/pj-fleck-minnesota-gophers-preview
Go Gophers!!
