Is P.J. Fleck the most disrespected coach in America?

Minnesota football head coach P.J. Fleck has built an outstanding résumé over the years. For whatever reason, it has been continuously overlooked.

The Big Ten Conference is one of college football’s most promising leagues, and several teams deserve a slice of the credit for helping it hold such a standard. If you were to ask folks for examples of said teams, names like Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State would likely be some of the first ones you’d hear.

Beyond those powerhouses, there is another school that, while having neither the brand nor the success that those do, also deserves some acknowledgment: Minnesota.

The Golden Gophers have been a strong force in the Big Ten’s West division for the past several years, having won eight games or more six times since 2012. Half of those instances have been under current head coach P.J. Fleck.

Fleck took over in Minneapolis for the 2017-18 year, and so far, that’s been his only full season there to finish with a losing record. As for his best season with the Gophers, they managed to hit a spectacular 11-2 record just two years after the sorry debut. It gave the program the most wins it’s seen in a single run since 1904.

Most recently, Minnesota football has had back-to-back 9-4 seasons, which is also a level of excellence that hasn’t been seen since the early 1900s. In both years, they won a bowl game to keep their postseason win streak alive (six-straight bowl wins, a total of four have been obtained while under Fleck).

When you combine all of that with previous accomplishments from his time at Western Michigan—three of four seasons saw records of 8-5 or better, including the university’s greatest of all time (13-1 in its 2016-17 run)—Fleck appears to be one of the top HCs in America today. The only problem is that he gets next to no recognition for it.

Just how harshly has P.J. Fleck been overlooked?

Some big-name media sites have taken on the task of ranking college football’s best coaches as we’ve grown closer to the fall, such as Pro Football Focus and CBS Sports. The pair made top-25 lists, with both doing Fleck dirty; PFF did not rank him at all while CBS just barely squeaked him in at 24th (and that was with the latter being Power 5 only).

With P.J. Fleck not being present on the first list, there was of course no context provided as to why he was left out. As for the second, the analysis was surprisingly positive in spite of his underwhelming placement.

For the majority of his assessment of Fleck, CBS Sports’ Tom Fornelli (the one behind their rankings) actually did make a point of praising him for all the good he’s done with the Golden Gophers.

In fact, there was only one piece of criticism (if you could even call it that) that Fornelli shot his way—his polarizing personality. To quote Fornelli directly: “There are two types of people in the world: those drawn to Fleck’s personality and those turned off by it.”

He went on to state that regardless of where one may stand on the matter, the results achieved with Minnesota football stand tall, and I couldn’t agree more with that mindset.

Concerns surrounding Fleck’s “personality” mean nothing to me if he keeps winning as much as he has with talent that’s willing to play for him. Simply put, who am I to dictate his worth as a head coach by something as subjective as an interpretation of his personality when his success is staring me dead in the eyes?