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UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

August 26, 2018

P.J. Fleck

Minneapolis, Minnesota

P.J. FLECK: Great to see everybody. Kickoff the season, huh? Here we go, game week. I don't really have much of an opening statement, so it's game week. I'm sure you've got some questions, and I'm here to answer them. So, I guess let's get rolling.

Q. (Indiscernible)?
P.J. FLECK: Got a chance to watch them, not only on the game film, but also on the TV copy. Got a chance to do both. Very rare does a head coach get a chance to do that. You somehow do that throughout the game in preparation, but rarely do you get to see it live. We tape both so I get a chance to see both.

But I don't think it's just a one-game evaluation, right? This is accumulation of what they did last year. This team won their first bowl game in a very, very long time last year. I was a part of group of five team who did that as well. And you know what type of accomplishment that is, and the type of momentum that gives you into the next year.

You know, like I said, we've got our hands full on the entire year. We're going to worry about us, we're going to worry about our team. We've got to continue to get us better and can't focus on what other people do. I will say that Wyoming defense is one of the best defenses -- I don't even know necessarily if it's the group of five, that's one of the best defenses in the country, and I think everybody saw that last night. So we're not going to let one game, whether a win or a loss, of our opponent dictate how we do things. It just continues to gain information.

We're not sitting there looking to say, hey, this team's good, or this team isn't good. This team's creative, not creative. We're basically just gaining the knowledge from them. How different do they look this year from last year? What do they do similar? What are the new wrinkles? Then you continue to add to the game plan.

One thing I know, they're a dangerous football team. You know, especially last year, and you can tell. Their defense, they were on the field a long time yesterday. But everybody's back from last year for the most part. Then you look offensively and they've got to replace some key pieces. So, you know, that's what we took from last night.

Q. You expect a lot of blitzing or maybe unorthodox things from that defense?
P.J. FLECK: Well, I think you can gain knowledge from yesterday. That's one thing you can do. Anytime somebody has the first game to be able to show what you're doing, you know, you gain as much knowledge as you can. But we're always going to expect new wrinkles. We're always going to expect new things throughout a game. That's part of the game day development in terms of from the start to the finish of the game. You're always changing, you're always evolving, you always see things you haven't seen before.

We know that they're going to have some things for us that maybe they didn't show in the first game or even last year. They continue to grow and have an extension off of what they did last year. But I know we'll be expecting a lot of different things. That's for sure.

Probably some in the game at Wyoming that we'll probably have, but our offenses are very different. Wyoming and us are a little different that way in terms of our offensive strategy. So I don't think you can take a lot from that game, necessarily, of how they're going to play us. But there is a lot of film last year of how they played opponents that are similar to us that we can gain knowledge from. But I'm sure they've evolved over the course of a year or two.

Q. How would you describe how much is going to be on Zack's shoulders going into Thursday? Where do you want to see the improvement in the passing game?
P.J. FLECK: We just want to be better as a whole. As an offense, defense, special teams. It's not just put on one guy. Our quarterback is going to be expected to run the offense, and that is what our expectations is of him. It's not how much do we put, how little do we put? Our offense is going to run the way our offense needs to run.

As you go through -- whenever you have a quarterback or quarterbacks who haven't played before, remember, we're going to gain information together. I mean, as media and coaches, we're gaining the same information. Whether a guy who has success or he fails, we're gaining that together. This isn't year three of somebody starting in a different system with a new head coach.

This is the second year in a row we've had our starters have not played any college football yet in games. But I'm highly confident these two individuals that are on our football team and obviously with a nod going to Zack, that they can handle what we give them on game day. They're expected to execute it at a very high level. No matter what year you are.

But, again, I want to make sure everybody knows that there are 53% of this team is freshmen, which is the most in the country. I think there are 28 or 29 on our two-deep. But that is part -- that's exactly, if you go back, that's exactly what we said. Come year two, we're going to be younger than we've ever been, but you're going to start to see some of the skill and talent and development of our football team take shape, and you'll be able to see some of that this year. But I don't think necessarily offense is going to be any different because of that. We're going to do what he does well.

Q. Any updates on the roster as far as availability going into the first game?
P.J. FLECK: In terms of specifically? Do you have any --

Q. It was meant generally, but also with Benny Sapp?
P.J. FLECK: Yeah, well, Benny's going to play. Remember, we talked about earlier in the year. You could ask me about a lot of freshmen, and I'm probably going to tell you they're going to play. You don't put those guys on your two deep saying, yeah, I don't think he's going to play. We're going to red shirt him. We don't have that option.

Remember, most of our depth is filled with freshmen, and that's why we recruited them. That's why it was such a highly ranked class. We knew we had to get players that could come in here and play in the Big Ten their first year.

Now, again, there are so many young players on there that we define failing as growth. There are going to be a lot of guys that make mistakes. There is going to be a lot of failing out there, but they're going to grow from it. There's going to be a lot of success out there as well. There are going to be a lot of our older guys leading the way showing these young guys what to be able to do.

But we're going to need a lot of our freshmen. I'm not even talking just the four games. I'm talking playing throughout the year. But, again, that's how you get better. That's how you grow. You've got to go through it. At some point we've got to go through it. If we want to get to where we want to be as a program, whenever that is, whether that's this year or down the road, you've got to go through it, guys.

The way that we know how to run our program, and the way that we were hired to run a program is to be able to do it this way. People can call it the right way, wrong way, safe way, risky way, whatever people want to talk about it, this is our way. This is what we're doing, and I don't think we've ever stemmed off what we said from the beginning.

We're going to get younger before we get more experienced, and we got a lot younger. But, again, it's also that talent level is going up. Not only just the recruiting, but the development of our players in house. The Carter Coughlins, Kamal Martins, the Rodney Smiths, those are better football players, and that's what we want to continue to see.

Q. In your second opener here, does it feel more comfortable this time around?
P.J. FLECK: You're never comfortable as a coach, ever. I'm not sure -- I don't know when that ever happens. Every coach I've ever talked to, no matter what age you are, you're never necessarily comfortable. I don't think coaches want to be comfortable. I think we live a life that's -- you do everything you can to be as comfortable as you can, and you're still uncomfortable. That's what head coaches do.

You're paid to be paranoid all the time. You're constantly worried about 17 to 22-year-old kids, the decisions they make, the choices they make. And then when you sit there and read your roster and you look at it, and you see your two deep, all right, well, we've got a lot of young guys that got to grow up and race to maturity, and that's the reason why we picked the theme we did. So, but you're never comfortable as a coach.

I think you have peace. You've got to find peace. That's hard to find, but you've got to find it. Knowing you're doing everything you can to be the best you can be in doing it the way you always said you're going to do it and not let anybody else take you off that path. That's where I guess I find more peace than comfort, does that make sense?

But you've got to be comfortable being uncomfortable being a head coach.

Q. How do you allow for mistakes when you know you've got a young team like this, as opposed to bringing somebody out and saying you're not going to keep playing if you make mistakes. At the same time, you get this growth curve of freshmen, what is the leash like for these kids?
P.J. FLECK: It just depends on what type of mistakes they are, right? There are cultural mistakes that nobody can make, doesn't matter what age you are. The ball is the program. We said that from the start. Those are cultural mistakes and there are catastrophic. There are different things. We know people, as they continue to get better, they haven't been in the system long enough to be able to perfect it yet. We hope that our older guys can limit those for us.

But we know that freshmen are going to -- I look back to when I was a player as a freshman, I wasn't even close to being the player I was as eye junior, senior, and upperclassman. Not even close. But that's the position we're in.

Whether it's a long leash, short leash, everybody is treated fairly, I should say. Not everybody is treated equally. You know, Rodney Smith versus one of the true freshmen backs, it's probably going to be a little different how you handle those guys. But everybody's treated fairly. We've got to make the decisions best for our football program as you keep moving forward to get better.

But we do have a young group that's got to mature and grow up. But part of the growing up process is going through games.

But I love the talent we have on this football team. That's what's really exciting. I love the talent we have. And that's one full class, and that's one year of development. I love the talent. It's just we've got to continue to get them to play together, get them experience, and the only way to get that is to go through it.

Q. Entering the season, what are you looking forward to the most with this team?
P.J. FLECK: I'm excited to watch them play. You know? We always talk about, you know, practice like a pro. Practice isn't necessarily fun all the time, right? You guys have been out there. It's not necessarily like everybody loves to practice every day. Particular people that love practice, but every single day, I'd like to meet that person, like every day in football that you just can't wait, even through the dog days of summer.

But we're practicing like professionals. I love how this team practiced this year. Then you've got to play like a youngster. You've got to play like a kid. Go out there and have fun and actually play. I'm not saying play like a kid in terms of mistakes and think like a child. I'm not saying that. I'm saying play like you did when the game is really fun, when you're youthful, when you're young, the reason why you joined football. That we're still coaching and playing a game.

You know, as we've evolved here, I think, in the last five to ten years, the game and the fun part has been taken out at times for young people. That's why we run our program the way we do.

Eventually, we'll all be judged on wins and losses. Every coach always is. But I want our team to enjoy the time they have playing together, together. That's the big thing we've talked this year about. Enjoy playing together, have fun together, and that's what I like about this team.

That's what I liked at the beginning of spring ball when I saw this team has fun with each other. Then we added a bunch of young kids that love to play the game, that have fun. That's exciting. I'm really excited to watch them play the game.

Do I know there are mistakes coming? Yes. Do I know there is adversity coming? Yes. We all know that. But I'm excited. All this work they've done, just like everybody in the country, but I'm excited to watch them play and have fun.

Q. Do you see a development of the running back position this summer?
P.J. FLECK: It's evolving. Remember, that was one position, as many of the other positions, if you ask, we had to develop those freshmen fast. Mohamed Ibrahim is somebody that's had tremendous development. Not the biggest, strongest guy, but he is a tremendous running back for our system. He fits us. He fits us culturally. He fits us exactly what we want in terms of a running back.

He's a decisive, one-cut guy. He's strong for not being a huge guy. Very, very strong, great pad level, saw huge development from him in the pass game. He's a better receiver than he was last year. Then Bryce Williams, I think you're going to see a lot of him as a true freshman.

Behind Rodney are two freshmen. And like a lot of positions we have. But Bryce has developed a lot in the last probably five weeks. He's really separated himself, and I think he's mature enough and ready enough to play.

I think he understands his role to do that. A lot of these are firsts, and we've got to get through the firsts as well. But I'm excited to watch him play.

Q. When it comes to "Row the Boat" you've had your message about what that is and it has inspired people throughout the state. Have their stories come back to you, and how has that impacted you?
P.J. FLECK: Most of the stories do come back to me, whether it's on social media, Facebook, Twitter. It's inspiring. To think back, it was one thought that stemmed from adversity. That took a while to develop. When I kind of unveiled it, everybody made fun of it, and people still do.

But at the end of the day, that's always going to happen when you sit there and say here I am as a person, and you share yourself with other people instead of closing yourself off. When you have something like row the boat, you share that with everybody else, and not only that you attach it to your football program so everybody else can look at your football program. Not only just a football program, but something that can inspire and motivate others who don't have anything to do with football.

To hear these stories that inspire people and to hear what our program is, what that one thought was and that one slogan was years ago, and what it's about, to see that inspire and motivate other people to be better, to not give up, whether people have lost somebody or have been through and beat it, to be able to either celebrate and create a foundation, create a fund, live somehow in memory of that person, or celebrate that person still being here, you know, through that type of never-give-up attitude, it's inspiring. It is.

I told you before, as a football coach we have a platform, and what you do with that platform is very powerful. You have a message, and whatever you decide to share that message with other people, that's your decision.

We decide, yes, wins and losses are going to be judged on me as a football coach. But me as a person and somebody who is a public figure, I want to be looked at as somebody who can bring hope and motivation and inspiration to families who are dealing with things that maybe they have nowhere else to turn. Maybe they need something else, they need a jump start. If they can look at our program, then we're doing our job. Then I'm doing my job as a head football coach.

Because I know not only people around our state and around the country who have emailed and tweeted and direct messaged and sent things. I get more mail than I've ever imagined. I spend more time writing letters back half the time, and I'm sitting there, man, at some point I've got to watch some film here. But if they're going to write me, I'm going to write them back. That's a powerful message.

When you walk down our tunnel and see all those oars and we're rotating those, that's inspiring. You know you're making a difference.

Our players, our program is making a difference. That's what we want to be able to do. If we can do that one person at a time, then we're doing our job. I'm proud of it, but I know it can even be better and continue to be bigger as we keep going.

But it's real. It's very real, for whatever anybody says about it, it's real, and it's there, and it's making a huge impact on our state, and the community and the nation in terms of people who are struggling with different things. We can always be that beacon and that guiding light and be a sense of hope for them.

Q. What are your expectations of special teams?
P.J. FLECK: Well, we need to be very consistent, you know. Rob Wenger is the best special teams coordinator in the country. He's got a huge challenge ahead of him. As we talk about offense and defense in terms of we talk about our youth, a lot of those youthful players are going to play a huge role on special teams.

We have so many young guys starting. We talk about the 53% of us are freshmen, but a lot of those guys might not be necessarily starting all of them on offense or defense. A lot of them are, but on special teams there's a lot of them that are starting, and we consider that starters. So we have a lot more freshmen starters than we thought we would based on special teams.

But the expectations, obviously, are be to very consistent, be a huge role. I think it's divided into thirds. It's offense, defense, and special teams. The way we look at it is just as important as offense and defense. We've got to be able to create incredible field position and take advantage of that from other people.

Again, we have some guys who haven't done it in the punting department. They're going to have some opportunities to show they can do it in games and we need to be very consistent.

Q. Talk about what the punters have done going through spring?
P.J. FLECK: They've gotten better. They've got to continue to get better as we go through the season. The competition has been healthy. I think Jacob's going to start out by punting here soon, but not to say we won't put Alex in there. I think that will be an evolving week-to-week type feel just on who is punting it better.

But we've got to get consistent in that category.

Q. The slogan "Race to Maturity", how did that one come about? And how do you implement that and instill that on a day-to-day basis with your team?
P.J. FLECK: Every program you take over has its own challenges. It's not the exact same at the last place I was at. But you look at similarities. Now, we have a strategic, year-by-year development of how we look at our program. What do we need to emphasize, what are we going to be?

Usually in the second year when I took over a program, we get a lot younger. When we got here and we looked at our roster, we knew that we were going to have to get really young, really quickly. Right, wrong or indifferent, that was what we walked into and that's what we needed to do, so we did it.

There are some people that might sit there and say, well, we'll bridge the gap for that to happen, and we'll get half of them junior college, half of them freshmen, or we'll go mostly junior college, and then the next year we'll do freshmen. That's not how I develop a program.

We want to build this down the road to sustain over and over and build that cultural sustainability that a lot of teams in our conference have. But to get there, you have to go through a lot of things that might not make a lot of sense to a lot of people, with playing so many freshmen and having that type of role.

But that's what we have. Those are the challenges that we had when we got here. We have to be able to take that and run with it. And that's what we're going to continue to do.

But, again, it's Race to Maturity, we define it in doing what you have to do becomes doing what you want to do. Just think of young people in general. Think of your kids, they're immature. My kids are immature. When they want to do something, it's usually not what they have to do. And when you tell they have to do something, it's usually not what they want to do. But as you grow up, you see how that meshes.

We need these freshmen who, again, are just like your children, probably don't want to do it, but they have to, to get them to know they have to do it at a very young age is very difficult to do. So that's why we say we have to have a Race to Maturity.

It gives the older guys a huge responsibility to get the young guys caught up. Remember, last year, we didn't have a lot of that teaching of anything because everything was new. Now at least we have a small group of nine scholarship offensive, defensive seniors that at least can teach. They can at least -- they've mastered it, and now they can give it to others, where last year everybody was learning it.

So would I like to have 29 seniors this year? Sure. We don't. But that's why we need that maturity and that young group to act like those seniors at a very young age. Sometimes you're taking a square peg and jammed it into a round hole. But that's why everything we did, we had to have maturity at the front end of it.

Listen, we have to have you to do this. Here's why. Just like we talked about millennials, you have to tell them why. Then show them you should want to do this, here's why. And then hopefully it will pay off.

Q. Have you noticed a difference this week in offense and the team in general with the announcement of a starter?
P.J. FLECK: No, I don't think the team, either way, whoever you picked, I know the team trusts both of them. I know that, if you ask anybody, they're going to support any decision. I've learned that about this team.

This team is very aware of their surroundings. They know exactly what goes on at practice, and I think they'd be very confident with either one of them. So I don't think that would ever come into play. That's the truth.

I mean, you look at Zack and look at Tanner, that's an unbelievable quarterback competition. Like I said, I have no problem putting both of them in the game. Not one problem. I don't think we'd miss a beat at all.

Q. Do players ever go lobby for other players and say, hey, Coach, you're not seeing this right? This kid's better than this kid? Do they ever come in and say I think that receiver's better?
P.J. FLECK: Not one bit, nope. I think we keep everything very open, very honest. We always let them know why. I think they see that. Now, individually about yourself as a player?

Q. About somebody else.
P.J. FLECK: No, I don't ever see that, other players coming in for other players, I haven't seen that. For themselves, I have. Hey, Coach, can you explain why. Like are you sure my role's going to be this big this soon? Or, Coach, is there a reason I'm not getting any, or this many reps? Yeah, exactly. I want our players to feel comfortable coming in. I feel like they do. As long as you're communicating all the time as a head coach. If you keep a gap and there is no communication, that gap usually gets filled with negativity. In human beings, if there is a gap and a lack of communication, most of the time that gap is filled with negativity. Why? That's the human species. That's human nature.

My job is to eliminate that gap as much as I can in every area of our department being completely open with our players and letting our players know they can always come in to my office and ask why. For our part, making sure our players always know why we make the decisions we make.

Q. Who is the third-string quarterback?
P.J. FLECK: We'll find out as we keep going through. We're going to have to be very creative. If that makes any sense. We'll have to be very creative. I hope we don't get to that point, but if we get to that point, we'll handle it.

We have a plan. I'm not going to give you that plan yet, but we have a plan.

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