P.J. Fleck Is Just a College Football Coach

Last week, A.J. Perez at Front Office Sports published a report featuring interviews with former Minnesota football players alleging various structural problems in the program.

According to the ex-players, head coach P.J. Fleck and his staff has pushed injured players to return from injury too soon, pressured players to overconsume to make weight, used additional workouts as punishment (even after the NCAA banned the practice), and fostered a culture that inhibits individualism in favor of strictly following Fleck's many motivational tactics and slogans — for example, always answering in an affirmative "I'm elite" when asked how one is feeling, regardless of whether that is true.

There was also the "Fleck Bank." Fleck described the Fleck Bank on Friday as an early analogy he devised for promoting community service and the program's stated ethics. The interviewees in the story said it became (however formalized) a system of favoritism that let certain players avoid suspensions for breaking team rules or failing a drug test.

The nature of some of these allegations is not new. Nor are the responses from some other current and former Gophers, who then and now have stood behind Fleck and the Minnesota football program's culture. By the standard of whether the report is shocking or especially revelatory, or by the threat it poses to Fleck's job, then sure, this is a non-story.

But if only some of the allegations are true, they should still be cause for concern. Not because they would demonstrate that Fleck must be removed immediately, and that the culture is entirely rotten, but because the story reflects larger cultural problems within college athletics that coaches and administrators too often perpetuate and leave unaddressed.

Sports lack a way of handling widespread, everyday problems like these. If you have participated in organized competitive sports, or known someone who has, there is a good chance you have experienced, witnessed, or heard of situations not entirely dissimilar to the allegations against Fleck and his program.

Coaches who want players back on the field ask, "Are you injured or hurt?" and encourage them to play through pain. To put on — or just maintain— weight, athletes have to take in insane amounts of calories, often well beyond the point of discomfort. Before there was a rule against it, we all did punitive bear crawls, up-downs, or sprints, even if it wasn't right. Especially when someone new comes in, athletes are required to adhere to a coach's image for a team, even on ticky-tack stuff. If someone is on a coach's good side, they may be granted extra latitude. And in school-sanctioned sports, an athlete must balance the requirements of their sport while studying, which puts even greater strain on one's mental health. To be a high-level college athlete requires all-encompassing, unhealthy demands on the human body and brain.

While the degrees of severity may differ, none of this is unique to Minnesota. It is a college football program, where oversight is often cursory and the true priorities are winning and profit. At its head is a college football coach, an inflexible, ego-driven, workaholic millionaire whose methods and cult of personality are validated by every win he adds to his record.

In Fleck's case, the wins are more frequent than the losses. It does not appear athletic director Mark Coyle, former president Joan Gable, or the regents Fleck has nominally answered to have been interested in a full-scale investigation into potential malpractice. However much you believe former regent Michael Hsu, or any of Perez's other sources who believe the U of M is intentionally looking the other way to avoid a scandal, the university's flat refutations of any wrongdoing do not suggest Fleck faces much scrutiny.

He, like every other coach in the country, deserves that scrutiny. If these problems are real, then he deserves to face consequences for overseeing and fostering them, even if the misdeeds likely do not warrant the only punishment this sport (sometimes) knows when and how to hand out: a firing.

The experiences of Tyler Nubin or Jack Gibbens or anyone else who genuinely benefitted from playing for Fleck, and those of the former players who spoke to Perez about how playing for Fleck hurt them, do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Some may view Fleck's methods as "just football," albeit wrapped in a decidedly Fleckish package that nevertheless speaks to them. Others could find the day-to-day life in the facility inconveniencing at times but altogether positive enough to stick around. And others still could arrive everyday feeling like they must put on a character to get by, or that the physical and mental challenges placed on them by an allegedly conformative and excessively strenuous environment are too much to bear.

If just one former player requires therapy as a result of being in a football program, or says that he suffers from PTSD and cannot look at his old team-issued gear because of the suffering he associates with it, that qualifies as a colossal failing on the part of the person leading that program.

However much he reflects college football's larger problems, Fleck is culpable for being just another college football coach. And he is culpable for however far he goes beyond the sport's usual standards to maintain a program as he sees it. All who play for him deserve something better.