A lot of this goes back to expectations. Fleck came to MN off a 13-1 season at WMU. He was billed as one of the top young, up-and-coming coaching prospects in the country.
Right or wrong, fair or not, people had expectations that Fleck was coming in to take the program to a higher level.
Fleck apparently saw things differently. Instead of seeing an OK program that needed a boost to get to the next level, Fleck saw a program with systemic problems that needed to be torn down to the foundations and re-built.
If he would have come out and said that on Day 1, some people would have been upset at the time - but I think fewer people would be upset now.
If Fleck would have said this was a total re-build, and there was a good chance that it would take 4 years just to get the program back to a respectable level, again, people would have griped. ticket sales may have taken a hit. but the current season would have been placed in context.
Some of us thought we were hiring a guy to build an addition onto the house. He came in and tore the house down. That's not what some people expected, or thought we were paying for. Hence the disappointment and second-guessing.
Now, you can argue that the fans are the ones who made the mistake. That Fleck was signalling to us what to expect, and we missed those signals. I would say that those signals were not clear and loud enough to be easily understood - and got lost in all the verbiage, slogans and catch phrases.
Either way, there was clearly a huge disconnect between what some people expected, and what Fleck planned to do. That comes down to communications.
