Young Gopher football team sets off on P.J. Fleck's 'race to MAH-turity' (2024)

As University of Minnesota athletic director Mark Coyle sat in his corner office of the new Athletes Village building less than a week before the Gophers home opener, he was interrupted by tubas.

The school’s band marched by on its way to practice, passing by the second-floor windows of Coyle’s office en route to TCF Bank Stadium. The blare of the big brass instruments briefly stopped Coyle mid-sentence as he talked about the school’s new $166 million facility for its student-athletes and the impact he hopes the building has on Minnesota’s athletic and academic success.

“It does have an impact on recruiting,” Coyle said, just as the low notes of the tubas cut him off.

The Athletes Village, complete with all the bells and whistles imaginable, isn’t the only thing helping the Gopher football team land recruits. Coyle gives plenty of credit to second-year head coach P.J. Fleck and the energy he’s helped inject into a program in need of a boost.

The Gophers were searching for a new football coach after a tumultuous 2016 season that ended in the firing of Tracy Claeys after just one season. Claeys replaced Jerry Kill when the latter retired for health reasons, but the fallout from how Claeys handled an alleged sexual assault involving some of his players played a role in his dismissal after a 9-4 record and Holiday Bowl victory in 2016.

Fleck was the first major hiring for Coyle as the school’s AD, and he’s since made a few more high-profile coaching hires with a new men’s hockey coach (Bob Motzko) and a familiar face as the women’s basketball coach (Lindsay Whalen). Given the state of the football program at the time, coupled with the fact that it was his first big hire, Coyle knew the pressure was on to find the right coach.

Fleck’s relentless zeal is what initially drew the interest of Coyle, who admits the Gophers needed to “shake the tree a little bit” with regards to bringing in a new culture. Though Fleck’s slogans may seem gimmicky to some — he said Sunday that he still gets grief for his ubiquitous use of “Row the Boat” — Coyle says they’re genuinely a part of Fleck’s personality and his plan for building a program.

“Our No. 1 objective when we hire somebody to be a coach at our program is we want to find the best fit for our program and for our students,” Coyle said. “I felt when we hired P.J., when we sat down with him, that authentic energy, that authentic passion comes out immediately. I always tell people, when he talks, you scoot up to the edge of your seat. You listen. He’s a very good communicator with people. Those are the things that jumped out.”

In his first season with Minnesota, Fleck was featured on a four-part documentary called “Being P.J. Fleck” that aired on the ESPN family of networks. The show peeled back the curtain a bit on how Fleck operates on a daily basis, both on the football field and away from it. It also put his big personality on a bigger platform.

Having Fleck showcased on national television was a boon for the Gopher football program, which started gaining more attention outside of the Land of 10,000 Lakes thanks in part to the spirited head coach.

“You have people all over the country calling me and saying, ‘Hey, who is this guy? What is he doing? Is he really like that?’ So that type of publicity goes a long way to help with recruiting,” Coyle said. “I think you saw that with the highly-touted recruiting class he brought in this past year. I tell people that energy’s authentic. He’s like that all the time. I talk to him almost every day of the week. I can tell you he’s like that 24/7, which is great.”

Fleck always seems to be on, seemingly always positive, always trying to motivate. He was a social studies teacher before becoming a college football coach and still tries to teach in everything he does.

To constantly go at that speed must take plenty of caffeine, one would think. That’s apparently not the case with Fleck.

“I think it’s just natural,” Coyle said. “He’s not a coffee drinker. I’ve never seen him drink a cup of coffee.”

Maybe it’s Red Bull?

“I’ve never seen him drink that, either.”

P.J. Fleck is a man of many phrases.

The 37-year-old coach brought his “Row the Boat” mantra with him from Western Michigan to Minnesota. He’s used acronyms like H.Y.P.P.R. (How Yours Process Result Response) and F.A.M.I.L.Y. (Forget About Me I Love You) to help build the culture around his team. There are other phrases sprinkled in on occasion, with “ELITE” being among the more common.

Yet as Fleck and his staff embark on their second season of a rebuild at Minnesota, he’s introduced another phrase that embodies what 2018 is all about for the Gophers: “Race to MAHturity.”

The newest expression manages to incorporate part of the university’s longtime slogan “Ski-U-Mah” into it. Its meaning speaks to the youth of Fleck’s roster, one of the youngest in the country. Of the 113 players on the team, more than half of them — 60 of 113 —are freshmen or redshirt freshmen.

As the Gophers look to get better, they first have to get more experienced. That’s where the race to maturity comes in.

“Usually in the second year when I took over a program, we get a lot younger. When we got here and we looked at our roster, we knew that we were going to have to get really young, really quickly,” Fleck said. “Right, wrong or indifferent, that was what we walked into and that’s what we needed to do, so we did it.”

No team in college football has more freshmen on its roster than Minnesota. Nearly 70 percent of the team is comprised of underclassmen. The Gophers aren’t using that as an excuse, but they also understand the reality of the situation they’re in as they get ready to embark on the season that begins Thursday night against New Mexico State.

That youth is most evident at arguably the most crucial position on the field. Minnesota’s four quarterbacks —Zack Annexstad, Tanner Morgan, Samuel Pickerign and Jon Santaga — have combined to play in a whopping total of zero college football games. All four are freshmen. Annexstad, named the starter last week, is a true freshman while the other three are redshirt freshmen. Morgan will start the year as Annexstad’s backup.

The race to maturity for the quarterback group may be more like a sprint than a marathon.

“This is the second year in a row we’ve had (where) our starters have not played any college football yet in games,” Fleck said of his quarterbacks. “But I’m highly confident these two individuals that are on our football team, and obviously with a nod going to Zack, that they can handle what we give them on game day. They’re expected to execute it at a very high level, no matter what year you are.”

Conor Rhoda started six games last year as a redshirt senior with no previous starts in his career. Demry Croft started the last six games of the season for Minnesota in 2017, but he transferred to Tennessee State this past offseason. Vic Viramontes was a highly-touted junior college transfer who left the program in early June before ever seeing action in maroon and gold. That left Fleck and his staff choosing between four quarterbacks with no experience.

Having a young roster is not something new to Fleck. He took over at Western Michigan in 2013 and had 44 freshmen and just 37 upperclassmen on the team of 105 players. The following year, that number grew to 49 freshmen and only 30 total juniors and seniors.

Yet that younger Broncos team won games. Fleck turned a 1-11 record his first year into an eight-win season a year later in 2014. Even though the Gophers are getting younger, Fleck hopes they can also get better and follow the trajectory his teams took in Kalamazoo. By 2016, in his final season there, Fleck’s Western Michigan team went 13-1, their only loss coming in the Cotton Bowl to a top-10 Wisconsin squad.

“It gives the older guys a huge responsibility to get the young guys caught up,” Fleck said. “Remember, last year, we didn’t have a lot of that teaching of anything because everything was new. Now at least we have a small group of nine scholarship offensive, defensive seniors that at least can teach. They’ve mastered it, and now they can give it to others, where last year everybody was learning it.

“So would I like to have 29 seniors this year? Sure. We don’t. But that’s why we need that maturity and that young group to act like those seniors at a very young age.”

The youthful Gophers are coming off a five-win season — including just two conference wins —but do have some key pieces returning on offense. That includes senior running back Rodney Smith, who fell just 23 yards shy of a 1,000-yard season in 2017.

With fellow senior Shannon Brooks possibly out for the year with a leg injury, it’s up to Smith to help get the younger running backs like freshmen Mohamed Ibrahim and Bryce Williams up to speed quickly as that group races to maturity.

“Anybody with experience has to share the knowledge that they have,” Smith said.

Smith will be one of just three seniors on Minnesota’s offense in 2018, yet another reminder of just how inexperienced this roster is. While players young and old were having to learn a new scheme in Fleck’s first year, the upperclassmen now have a handle on how things work and can help the big freshman class get caught up quickly.

The faster Minnesota’s young roster matures, the quicker the Gophers can catch up to the rest of the Big Ten. Fleck and Co. finished sixth out of seven teams in the Big Ten West last year. Not many folks outside of Dinkytown expect a big year from Minnesota, which lands near the bottom of many preseason Big Ten predictions.

One thing the Gophers have hung their hats on this past offseason was the highest-rated recruiting class Minnesota’s had in a long time, which Coyle sees as a testament to Fleck’s impact on the program. According to 247Sports, the Gophers’ 2018 class ranks 38th in the nation. Rivals has Minnesota’s latest crop of recruits at No. 43.

By default, many of those players from Fleck’s latest recruiting class will see the field sooner rather than later as they join their teammates in the race to maturity.

“To be very clear with you, those ratings are awesome, but we’ve got to produce on the field,” Coyle said. “I’m very comfortable with P.J. and his staff and how they’ll teach and coach those young men to compete on the field for us. It’s all trending the right way, from our standpoint.”

(Top image: Jesse Johnson/USA TODAY Sports)