It's early on a Saturday evening, and P.J. Fleck has just finished his game day duties. His Gophers football team dispatched Western Illinois 62-10, and Fleck has completed his postgame recruiting meet-and-greets, his address to his team and his media responsibilities. Then he heads home.
Time to relax, right? Time to decompress after a 2-0 start and spend some quality time with his wife, Heather, before returning to the grind of preparing for this week's game against Colorado?
Uh, well. Kind of, sort of.
Fleck checks out the college football action on TV, catches up on games from earlier in the day and plots a way to use mistakes he's seen by other teams as examples for his squad to avoid. These can be critical lessons, especially for an undefeated team that has yet to make a crucial mistake.
"Heather gets mad at me,'' Fleck said, adding, "well, maybe not mad at me, but she's like: 'So, let me get this straight. All week you're at the office, coaching football. You're planning football, you play on Saturday. We have, you know, seven hours of just me and you. And then we watch more football.
" 'And not only do we watch football, you watch it, pacing like a coach, like you're actually in the game. And not only are you pacing, you're actually texting [video coordinator] Matt Childers parts from the game to show your team to learn from. I got that right?'
"I was like, 'Absolutely,' " Fleck said, laughing. "And she loves every minute. That's why we're a great couple.''
It's just one of the methods Fleck and his coaching staff use during Sunday meetings to teach their players to be aware of certain situations throughout a game. If, for example, a video clip of Texas A&M making a mistake against Appalachian State can prevent the Gophers from making a similar mistake in their next game, all the better.
The easy way and the hard way
"There's two ways to learn — the easy way or the hard way,'' Gophers quarterback Tanner Morgan said. "You can learn the easy way from others' mistakes. … If another quarterback makes a mistake, 'OK, let me learn from this.'"
The hard way, of course, is the Gophers making the mistake themselves. Situational awareness is especially important for the Gophers during this early stretch of the season against less-than-stellar competition. The team has remained mentally sharp for the most part in blowout victories over New Mexico State and Western Illinois.
Colorado, a Power Five opponent, should offer more of a challenge. The Buffaloes, though, are 0-2, and the Gophers beat them 30-0 last year in Boulder, so guarding against overconfidence becomes important. Coaches and players always aim to treat each opponent the same in order to breed consistency, but human nature can take over, with the urge to relax after success.
Safety Tyler Nubin embraces the lessons from across the college football landscape. The clips that he and his teammates saw Sunday showed him how Alabama avoided the upset at Texas, how Kentucky beat Florida in The Swamp, how Iowa State edged Iowa in a game in which each team lost a fumble while going into the opponent's end zone.
"We always talk about knowing how to win games, not just lose the game less,'' Nubin said. "You see it a lot of times across the country. It's a game of situations. Whoever can play the situations best in that moment is going to win the game. We try to take advantage of every single situation we're in. Learning from other teams makes that easier.''
Sundays are for 'leather shirts'
In those Sunday meetings, Fleck instructs his players "to have their leather shirts on,'' the thick skin needed when taking constructive criticism about their play the day before. The aim is not to humiliate but to correct.
On the Gophers' second play from scrimmage against Western Illinois, wide receiver Mike Brown-Stephens fumbled the ball away while trying to gain extra yardage. He appreciated the fact that the offensive staff didn't give up on him, showing trust by targeting him two more times.
"In our program, we talk a lot about response,'' he said. "Things happen. I've got to do a better job of taking care of the ball. That was a big point of emphasis this week. … When something happens like that, you've got to pay more attention to it.''
Fleck's video session helped reinforce that.
"He does a good job grabbing things from other games and showing us what not to do,'' Brown-Stephens said. "There are things that we already know, but he brings more examples of it. It happens everywhere around college football. He's doing his best to be proactive.''
