There’s a good bit more to P.J. Fleck and Gophers football than rowing the boat

It may be heresy to some, but P.J. Fleck is more substance than showman.

That’s written with the knowledge the Minnesota football coach is regarded here in Iowa and elsewhere — but especially here — as a snake-oil salesman. Fleck is considered too gimmicky, too talkative, too tightly wired, too little of what a college football coach is expected to be.

The “Row the Boat” mantra Fleck brought with him from Western Michigan to Minnesota in 2017 has been mocked across the rest of the Big Ten ever since.

Yet, here we are in the ninth year of Fleck’s Minnesota tenure. Of the Big Ten’s 17 other coaches, only Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz has been at his school longer.

The Gophers haven’t been an upper-crust Big Ten program except for when they went 11-2 in 2019, but they’re 32-24 in the conference over the last seven seasons.

That record is even shinier if you remove Iowa from the equation. Fleck’s guys just beat Nebraska for the sixth-straight time, and have won four of the last seven against Wisconsin after losing 14 in a row to the Badgers. He’s 1-7 against Iowa while at Minnesota, however.

Minnesota has the nation’s longest current streak of bowl wins with eight, six under Fleck. The last four have been Guaranteed Rate, Pinstripe, Quick Lane and Duke’s Mayo bowls, so the prestige hasn’t been great. Still, Fleck has gotten his men to take the games seriously and outperform the opponents.

Who’s to know how the coaches at Iowa and Minnesota really feel about each other other than the coaches themselves? In 2020, Ferentz showed disdain in Minneapolis when he called three straight timeouts with a 35-0 lead, 19 seconds left, and the Gophers at the Iowa 9-yard line.

Fleck had called time first, and that apparently rankled his foe.

“They called a timeout, I guess, to get a look at what we were doing and reconsider,” Ferentz said after the game. “So we just wanted to make sure we got a good look at what they were doing. No sense in taking them on the bus with us.

“Figured we’d take Floyd with us and leave the timeouts here.”

It remains the sharpest needle in Ferentz’s time at Iowa.

However, five years have passed and Fleck hasn’t gone anywhere. In a market where pro sports hog the attention, the Gophers compete. Stability in programs keeps getting rarer in college football. Like the Hawkeyes, Minnesota has it.

The next time Fleck publicly jabs Iowa will be the first. In fact, he has always gone the other direction for years. Monday, he sounded like the Hawkeyes’ Twin Cities public relations spokesman.

“Their team never beats itself,” Fleck said in his weekly news conference. “Disciplined, physical, consistent. It’s like they just plug and replace. Same body-type, same effort, same system — and they win.”

Earlier in his remarks, he talked about how his job was to be “the cultural coach, the expectation coach, the accountability coach. And everybody who walks in the door every single day knows exactly what to expect.

“As you go from year to year to year to year, maybe some faces change. But the culture, the way you connect people, the way you bring people into the culture, into the program, the systems and the approach you have through the good and the bad, that part doesn’t change.”

That sounds like Iowa North.

“He's done something that really hasn't been done there in quite some time,” Ferentz said Tuesday. “They're winning consistently.

“You don't stay in the job if you're not doing at least a pretty capable job. ... You've got to be good and you've got to be consistent, and they've been that.

“They're typically a big, physical team, and they typically play really hard and they don't beat themselves”

That sounds like Iowa North, too.

“I have a lot of respect for Coach Ferentz and what he’s been able to do,” Fleck said. “Cultural sustainability — I’d probably ask him (about it) instead of me. He’s been doing it way longer at a way higher level.”

Many Big Ten coaches have flamed out in the last nine years. At Kinnick Stadium Saturday, the two head dudes abide. Whether they’re rowing a boat or not.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com