“…I know I have to win football games or I can’t do my job. But my job is to make sure these guys are successful. Period. This year, next year, when they’re 35, when they’re 55.”
Fleck is aware that his finish last year – his second sub-.500 finish in Minnesota in a full 12-game schedule – didn’t meet fans’ expectations. The downturn came after a stretch in which the Gophers had one 11-win season and two nine-win seasons in a four-year span, and Fleck believes the increased expectations are a good thing.
“The debate for us right now is, ‘What are you going to do after this disappointing year?’ We just won a bowl game! There are people here who just want to go to a bowl game, and we won for the fifth year in a row,” Fleck said during Big Ten Media Days in July. “It’s disappointing, but that’s what we said at the beginning. If (winning a bowl game) becomes disappointing, we’ll do an even better job. There will be ups and downs.”
Fleck’s boss, athletic director Mark Coyle, assesses the program’s ups and downs. The two have been together since Coyle hired Fleck in January 2017, and they are the longest-tenured football coach/AD duo in the Big Ten. Coyle wants to keep it that way. After UCLA courted Fleck for the coaching job in the offseason, Coyle gave Fleck a modified contract that will pay the coach an additional $5.7 million if he stays through the 2029 season. Fleck makes $6 million per year.
While Coyle said his goal for the program is to “compete at the highest level, and that’s the College Football Playoff,” his expectations for a specific season aren’t so easy to pin down.
“We talk about how important it is to be relevant,” Coyle said. “And we’ve talked to our coaches about how with this new Big Ten and everything that’s happening in college sports, we’re in a good position to be relevant – bowl games, NCAA tournaments, our teams getting to the postseason. Obviously, when you compete at a high level in the Big Ten, you have a chance to do something nationally.”
