Everything Minnesota football HC P.J. Fleck said after the Gophers' 27-14 loss to California
Minnesota football head coach P.J. Fleck met with the media following the Golden Gophers’ 27-14 loss to the California Golden Bears on Saturday evening. Here’s everything he had to say.
Opening Statement
Where do you want me to begin? That wasn’t very good football from us for a complete 60 minute game. told our team this could be the best thing possibly ever happens to us. I think really, really great teams. You look across the country, it’s, you gotta respond to adversity, you gotta respond to losing, and this team’s gonna be tested on how we do that.
Everything that possibly could go wrong went wrong, and that falls on the head football coach. But we had an unbelievable week of preparation. But again, preparation’s one thing.
And then once you go play the game, you gotta go play the game. You gotta do all the little things. We lost the ball, zero to two.
I’m sure we lost tackling, didn’t break enough tackles and missed too many tackles. And explosive plays, they had way more than we did. You gotta give them credit.
Coach Wilcox is a really good football coach. I’ve had a ton of respect for him. We’ve both been at the school the same amount of years.
He’s a really good defensive football coach. And I thought Coach Harsin called a really good game on offense for them. That quarterback’s a really good player.
There’s two programs that have really good young quarterbacks that are watching the future of their programs. And they got the victory tonight. We’ll learn a lot from that.
But you know, 0 for 2, it’s ball, like I said, we lost situational football. We lose the middle eight, we muff a punt, and then we’re petering it. Peter means peter, and you get away from that.
And if it’s hot and low, you let it go. If you don’t let it go, you don’t move backwards on a sky punt. We moved backwards all the way to the two-yard line.
We miss a field goal, throw an interception. We have PIs in really critical situations. Catastrophic — casual creates casualties.
And you’re not gonna go on the road in the ACC in a Power Four football game with two teams being pretty close in who they are, and you’re not gonna win games when you make that many mistakes. And I’m not taking anything away from Cal.
They’ve earned it. They won the football game. They did a really good job.
Their coaches coached better than me, than us, and their players played better. And when you go on the road, you gotta execute at a high level. I thought there were so many good days.
I thought we responded. There was so much adversity throughout the game. I mean, even look at the first half, as bad as it went.
Kind of reminded me of UCLA last year. And then, boom, we tie it, and then we let it go 45 yards in 40 seconds. And again, I just thought we didn’t communicate well.
We weren’t all aligned at times. We weren’t doing crazy communication. And again, hopefully, it got that out of our system.
Because that is not the football team that I know. That’s not the football team that I’ve coached. That’s not the football team I’ve seen.
But that’s all coach speak. The numbers are the numbers. When you look at it, like I said, there are two really similar teams.
And again, there’s different styles, I get that, but two very similar teams. And when you lose the turnover battle 2-0, and everything else — you miss a field goal — you’re not gonna win the game. Simple.
So, gotta give them credit. Congratulations to Cal. Great atmosphere. I mean, great game, probably up until a few minutes ago, or ten minutes ago, a quarter to ten minutes ago. So, gotta give them credit. Congratulations to them.
With that, open up for questions.
On Koi Perich’s game and multiple roles
Fleck: All great players go through adversity. This is probably his first piece of adversity. In the 15 months he’s been here, adversity strengthens you. If you use it properly, and you swallow the pill of adversity, you take accountability and responsibility for it.
And we all do, it’s gonna make it better. He does so many great things, and he does them so naturally. And he’s been coached really hard by a lot of different people.
I guess that’s really hard to do everything. But when you get casual, and this is why we teach the way we do, because it’s a discipline piece. Those are the things, most games are lost, not won.
And look, Cal’s gonna say, “I won the football game,” and I get that part. But when you look at all the things we didn’t do, we were self-inflicted. Most games are lost — we lost that football game.
But again, Cal won the football game, but we didn’t do our part to put ourselves in position to win that football game at all, and he’ll learn a lot from it. I know he’ll take accountability for it. This is one of his first major adversities he’s had, but it was coming at some point, Andy.
That was coming at some point where your parents can tell you, “Don’t do that. Here’s how we’re gonna do it, here’s your curfew, and this is why we need you home in here, and this is why you watch out.” And then we have four kids of our own, and it’s not like they follow a single rule.
You’re a parent for a reason, and you’re a coach for a reason. But if you touch the stone, there’s a price to pay. Again, it’s not Koi’s fault, it’s my fault.
But it’s our team’s responsibility to win football, not Koi’s. Not Drake’s, not Maverick’s — we’re a team. And we didn’t do enough — special teams, offense, and defense — to win that football game in every area.
And that’s what it’s gonna look like. Now, “Craig did it, it’s all Craig’s fault.” And that’s so outside our world, it didn’t even look like our football game. We’re gonna correct it.
On Drake Lindsey’s first career road start
Fleck: Well, every time we blitzed one, they hit a shot over the top. I mean, we were doing everything we could to throw everything at them.
It wasn’t like we said, “We’re dropping people all the time.” When we brought blitzers, we brought people to them. You get a PI call, you bring man coverage, they make an unbelievable throw. Or he escapes the pressure.
Everything we were throwing at him, he did a really good job having an answer for. That’s what coaches are gonna do, and great players do.
I mean, they threw a lot at us. Drake had really good answers on a lot of things, too. But he’s a really, really special talent. You can tell why he was recruited the way he was recruited. And, yeah, that’s credit to him.
On the Gophers’ decision to run the ball and 3rd & 8
Fleck: Yeah, I mean, well, they have a three-technique player that blitzes a gap, and we don’t block him. But we just ran the football.
I know that we talk about this a lot with me sometimes on third down, but we had just hit a 12-yard run, and we’re already in field goal range. What I didn’t want to have happen — I don’t know how it’s gonna pan out — but I didn’t want to take a sack.
Now we’re out of field goal range, and now it’s completely different. So I thought we were creasing them, and I thought the run was really good.
I have to look at the tape — whether there was miscommunication — but we get split and tackled for a loss. But even if that ball’s a little closer, the ball’s still being pushed to the right.
So that’s a 17-7 game instead of 17-17, and everything’s a little bit different. But we missed a field goal. They made their field goals, they hit the upright and it went in. We missed our field goal, had two turnovers, and we were still in it all the way until the end.
But I mean, that’s the encouraging part, but it doesn’t feel good because you lose. But you take all the things besides the result. Because if we ended up winning that game, yeah, everybody feels better, but all of these things — they’re all the same. That doesn’t change the story.
And what we as coaches have to do is, the players just have to look at the story of the game, and then we’ve gotta get better at it.
On the Gophers’ backfield
Fleck: I thought Fame ran really hard. I think there were some yards that he left out there where he just punctured instead of bouncing, but I’ll have to really study the tape.
But I thought Fame ran really hard, gave us a spark in the backfield. After AJ went down, I thought Cam ran really hard too.
We’re missing our best player, and it’s two years in a row we haven’t had our best player when we’re gonna play a Power Four school. And we’re one of the teams that pick to play a Power Four school.
There are a lot of teams — some teams don’t choose to do that. That’s okay, but I think this gets us prepared for Big Ten ball.
We’ll have to go get Darius healthy quick. But I think Cam and Fame — I’ll have to go back and study — but I thought they ran really hard. They made some really good runs for us and kept us in it.
On the wide receiver’s performance
Fleck: Well, we said a long time ago that our freshmen — we’re gonna play some freshmen. They’re gonna be really good players. Our freshmen can’t play like freshmen. And so we can’t do that.
We’re gonna have to elevate our game. No one cares when you’re wearing your helmet and your jersey and there’s 11 guys on the field. No one’s saying, “That guy’s a junior, that guy’s a senior, that guy’s a fifth-year.” No one cares — you’re a team.
We have to play to the standard of what we expect. And when we drop balls, that’s not gonna get it done. Because in a game like that, every possession matters, every ball matters. And every ball’s equal.
And if we don’t do that and truly believe in that, that’s when you see some drops. And it was just too sloppy, that’s for sure.
And we’ll get it cleaned up, though. I mean, this is how guys learn. This is how you have to learn. Unfortunately, there’s an easy way and a hard way.
The easy way is watching other people do it. The hard way is doing it yourself. And this is a hard lesson we have to learn, but we’re gonna have to learn it. And that’s what I told our team.
And we’re gonna work on all the things we need to work on this week. We’re gonna squeeze all the juice from the orange. We’re gonna study ourselves.
We’re gonna watch this football game inside and out. We’re gonna watch it multiple times. But it’s about swallowing the pill of accountability — all of us.
Head coach, coaches, players, staff, everybody. I didn’t do a good enough job of getting this team prepared. It’s simple. I didn’t do a good enough job of getting this team prepared.
And maybe I overthought it. And as a head football coach, you always live with those things because you make decisions. But this doesn’t take anything away from Cal.
Cal played a tremendous football game. Coach Wilcox is a great coach. Quarterback played great, defense played great.
But I did love a lot of really positive things. And we’re gonna take some of those positive things and hang on to them. And it’s gonna keep propelling us forward.
So if we learn from it, it’s gonna be a great turning point in our season. If we don’t learn from it, it’s gonna keep showing its head. So we’ll do everything we can, and I know we will.
I love this football team. I love how hard they work. There’s so many good things out there. And it’s unfortunate we didn’t get the win tonight.
So I just want to thank all of our fans who did make the trip out here to Berkeley. I hope you enjoyed yourself. I’m sorry we didn’t do our part and win the football game.
But I do want to thank all of our fans who did make that trip. We heard you, and we’ll be better next time, that’s for sure.
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