It's hard to believe that the 2026 season will mark PJ Fleck's 10th season leading the Minnesota program.
In that decade at the helm, Fleck has had just two losing seasons (outside of the 3-4 COVID impacted season of 2020. The first game during a 5-7 debut season in 2017, and the other was after winning their bowl game in 2023 to improve to 6-7 on the year.
A remarkable beacon of consistency in the Big Ten coaching ranks, Fleck has won double-digit games in Minnesota once back in 2019, when they also finished ranked among the top 10 teams in the country, hit the nine-win mark another two times, and is coming off back-to-back 8-win seasons while punching the Gophers ticket to bowl games an impressive 7 times - all of them postseason wins to mark a 7-0 postseason record for the Minneapolis program.
Fleck's oar in the water (pun intended) has provided a steady dose of leadership for a program while the college football landscape as a whole has ushered in changes like NIL and the transfer portal during his time with the program.
Back when NIL was introduced, there was plenty of discussion about how paying one college kid $1 million and giving the guy in the locker next to that kid next to nothing was going to create a difficult locker room dynamic for coaches to navigate.
Fleck was asked about connecting his players and how he manages the locker room dynamic during a recent On3 podcast with Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman and provided some interesting insight into their approach that has helped them churn out consistent results.
For starters, Fleck explains that while they emphasize things being fair at Minnesota, that is not the same as everything being equal.
"We talk about in our program that nothing's equal. The world's not equal. I mean, that—that—that's a pretty life—that's a big life lesson that you need to find out at a very early age. Now, it's fair. It's fair. Maybe some people get more opportunities than other, maybe some guys got other reps than other people, but everybody's got an opportunity.
We just showed our team Tom Brady talking about he got two reps. That was the only opportunity he got, but he did really well with those two opportunities, then went to four reps, then went to eight, and now he's maybe the greatest football player that ever lived. So the fair piece I think's critical, and I think that's part of connecting a locker room."
Gratitude, empathy, and radical transparency also play key roles, as Fleck goes on to explain.
"We always used to say it's gratitude and empathy that connect the locker room, but I also think part of that is now in this NIL world is - is what you're paying players fair? Because kids talk, you know, and any player can walk into my office at any moment and say, 'You know what? Bang! Garrett's making more money than me. Why?' And I'll pull out a list of why that person makes that much money."
"So they can ask me why to anything, from the way we practice to what we pay them. They can always ask why. So everything in our program is fair. I sit down and tell parents in this exact office, 'It's going to be fair. You walk into this program, you're not going to be the highest paid player on this team. I'm not going to overpay for freshmen. I'm not, because they haven't done anything at Minnesota yet.' If I did that, it could ruin my locker room. So the locker room is so, so important. No matter if we're in the NIL world, the portal world, 1968 - it doesn't matter.
The connection in that locker room is really, really key, as we see along, uh, college football with—with some elite programs that might be underperforming and programs that maybe haven't performed in the past that have invested that are performing at a high level. So I think that that "fair" word, it can go a lot of different ways. But within our program, we feel like we have a very fair developmental educational college football program."
Hear Fleck's full thoughts in the clip.