College football’s coaching carousel is spinning faster and faster as the regular season enters its final month, and the breeze coming off it can be felt in Minnesota.
There are currently 13 job openings at FBS schools. Nine are from within the Power Four conferences, including some of the most marquee brands in the country — LSU, Penn State, Florida and Auburn.
National speculation is this cycle suggests there might be more than 40 head coach vacancies when the dust settles, meaning the breeze coming off the carousel now could rise to gale-force winds come December.
Even in less turbulent years, Gophers head coach P.J. Fleck is name-dropped for openings, primarily because of how he has outperformed his predecessors at Minnesota and done so relative to his current peers while having fewer NIL resources at the U.
Already this fall, Fleck has been named on coaching hot-board lists in The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, On3 and Football Scoop.
Gophers athletics director Mark Coyle, having lived through it before, knows Fleck will keep getting mentioned. He told the Pioneer Press that in September, when there were only three major openings.
“You hear all these names,” Coyle said last weekend on KFAN’s pregame show before the Gophers’ 23-20 overtime win over Michigan State. “Who’s going to Penn State? Who’s going to LSU? I’m not saying P.J. is going to one of those places, but his name is going to pop up in places. It’s going to create a trickle-down effect.”
Fleck’s resume won’t do enough to stir fan bases in, say, Happy Valley, Pa., or Baton Rouge, La., but it might hold appeal in spots such as Fayetteville, Ark., or in Blacksburg, Va. Compared to what they’ve had, Arkansas and Virginia Tech might like Fleck’s consistency, culture and ability to spike with a dream, championship-chasing season that ends in a big bowl game.
Across the previous 75 years of Gophers football, Fleck’s winning percentage (.603) is higher than any of his 12 predecessors.
While Fleck has produced only one outstanding season, 11-2 in 2019, he has two other nine-win campaigns, and this season’s team is on the verge of its sixth winning record over his nine total seasons. Two of those losing years were in his first campaign (2017) and the pandemic-shortened season (2020).
While things have been far from smooth this year, the Gophers’ 4-2 conference record has been good enough to sit sixth in the 18-team mega conference heading into the second week of November. They were tied for seventh last year.
This fall, Minnesota’s best win is a dominant 24-6 victory over then-25th ranked Nebraska (6-3, 3-3 Big Ten), but the Gophers have been run off the field by Ohio State, which debuted at No. 1 for the College Football Playoff rankings Tuesday, and 20th-ranked Iowa. The U also took a disappointing loss at Cal (5-4, 2-3 in ACC).
Fleck’s resume also includes a 7-17 record against teams ranked in the Associated Press Top 25. While he is 4-4 against rival Wisconsin, he is 1-8 versus Iowa.
This season, the Gophers have required comebacks for ugly wins against some of the worst teams in the conference: Rutgers, Purdue and Michigan State, which are a combined 1-17 in Big Ten play.
The Gophers were pegged by oddsmakers at 6 1/2 wins in the offseason. Currently sitting at 6-3 overall, they are bowl eligible going into this week’s bye. They will be huge underdogs at No. 9 Oregon next week, but can reach eight wins with victories over Northwestern (5-3, 3-2) at Wrigley Field on Nov. 22 and at home versus Wisconsin (2-6, 0-5) on Nov. 29.
On a near annual basis, Coyle and the U have awarded Fleck with contract extensions. The latest came in July, which keeps his annual salary at $6 million through Dec. 2030, while increasing his annual retention bonuses.
That total sum ($7 million) remains outside the top half of the highest-paid coaches in the Big Ten, and Coyle regularly comments on how he feels the need to be a good financial steward on behalf of the university.
“We feel really fortunate to have P.J. here, and our goal is to keep him here at Minnesota as long as we can,” Coyle said on KFAN on Nov. 1.
(Note: The athletic department is, by and large, financially self-sufficient from the rest of the university system.)
Fleck’s new contract revised down the buyout for him to leave — from $7 million to $5.5 million this year. In the current era of exorbitant coaching buyouts, that sum is paltry, especially compared to the huge sums paid by Penn State and LSU to have James Franklin and Brian Kelly leave their programs.
Some sitting coaches named in the rumor mill for other vacancies have already received highly lucrative contract extensions this season: Curt Cignetti at Indiana, Matt Rhule at Nebraska and Rhett Lashlee at Southern Methodist.
So, another contract extension for Fleck seems like a possible route.
“We will continue to have conversations,” Coyle said on the radio. “Our goal is to make sure that he and (wife) Heather feel valued here.”
Fleck has said he “loves” it in Minnesota. He continues to preach about “cultural sustainability” and that he is built to have more success with less resources.
But if this coaching cycle is as volatile as it’s setting up to be, dominoes could fall across the nation, and Fleck could be poached by another program. The value in sitting coaches is considered higher as schools are shelling out more than $13 million in revenue sharing dollars to pay players.
“I don’t see it slowing down,” Coyle said. “I think with the first year of rev share, the pressure on these coaches, the pressures on these programs. I mean, the Governor of Louisiana (Jeff Landry) was making comments about the whole situation (at LSU), which is just bonkers to me. I always say, ‘You can’t make it up. It’s college athletics.’ ”
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