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P.J. Fleck is an OK gameday coach, a good program builder and a great motivator.
That makes him decidedly above-average at his job as the Gophers football coach, and Fleck deserves credit for Minnesota’s accomplishments during what is now the third-longest tenure in the Big Ten.
This is also a transformational time in college football — and particularly the Big Ten — as conference realignment, the portal and, most importantly, the amount and manner in which players are paid makes even five years ago feel like the distant past.
With so much change creating an unsettled feeling, Fleck’s message speaking to Big Ten media members on Thursday in Indianapolis felt particularly resonant for the times: “In 2024, it’s OK to love where you’re at.”
Leaning into the present as the ground moves underneath you is a smart idea, as I talked about on Friday’s Daily Delivery podcast.
It would be hypocritical for me to suggest otherwise given that I wrote just this week about embracing the present (and rejecting a zero-sum definition of success) in a sports world increasingly bent on future possibilities.
And I really liked this from Fleck in explaining that he still believes in the root mission of college sports: “Our world has changed in this transactional world with the NIL, with the portal, with salary caps, with obviously conference expansions, new TV deals, but really the university experience is still there.”
But gifted speakers like Fleck also tend to want to control the narrative. His remembering of 2023 was a good bit of revisionist history, and it can’t land well with fans.
“The narrative around our place right now is, ‘What are you gonna do after the disappointing year?'” Fleck said. “We just won a bowl game. There are people here just trying to get to a bowl game [for the first time] in decades, and we won our fifth in a…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/p-j-fleck-trying-love-172600323.html
Author : Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Publish date : 2024-07-26 17:26:00
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