Brian Murphy: PJ Fleck can turn Jerry Kill’s whine into a whimper
Vegas oddsmakers have tarred New Mexico State 36 1/2-point underdogs as coach Jerry Kill returns to Dinkytown Thursday night to christen Minnesota’s 2022 college football season.
Bluntly speaking, his underwhelming Aggies suck. The FBS independents from the desert suck hard. Just not as hard as Country Jer keeps sucking on the maroon-and-gold pacifier that has been welded to his flapping gums for years.
Kill’s relentless and baffling trolling of Gophers coach P.J. Fleck has turned this afterthought at Huntington Bank Stadium into appointment viewing for Minnesota fans double-parked in headline purgatory.
The one-sided feud was revived in August when the old boy's network of the Minneapolis Dunkers Club invited Kill to speak before kickoff, then reneged the offer when Fleck’s faithful blanched at the duplicitous engagement.
How dare they roll out the red carpet for someone who has rolled the Messiah’s name through the muck ever since Fleck succeeded Kill’s buddy Tracy Claeys on the sideline? As the adults in the room roll their eyes at the absurdity of this sandbox stalemate.
This pathetic drama reached critical mass last week when Kill told KARE 11’s Randy Shaver he was unsure whether he would shake Fleck’s hand before or after tonight’s game. Still whining that Fleck dissed him and Claeys by vowing to change the Gophers’ culture when he assumed the reins in 2017.
As if Fleck were the first head coach in any sport to spew such an outrageous cliché at their introductory news conference.
Kill refuses to move on from a 5-year-old decision that rescued a Gophers football program paralyzed by a sexual assault scandal which exposed a glaring lack of institutional control and utter loss of self-awareness.
Athletic director Mark Coyle’s prudent decision to fire Claeys may have been ham-fisted in its execution. But it did not directly affect Kill, who already had resigned because of epileptic seizures.
Kill had the empathy of an entire state in his pocket when he retired in October 2015 to concentrate on his health and left Claeys to march into a public relations woodchipper.
Instead, Kill has squandered all that good will and great personal fortune by pouting and pounding on Fleck – even though he has resurrected his coaching career by taking better care of himself and managing his disease.
The will-he-or-won’t-he drama of pressing Fleck’s flesh is Kill’s latest and lamest unforced kicking of a hornet’s nest.
“I wish I knew what was going to happen when I get there and everything and, you know, we'll let it play out and so forth,” Kill told Shaver. “But, you know, hey, I'm not going to... you know, I’m proud of Minnesota.”
Pride ain’t doing Kill any favors.
Three years ago, he ripped Fleck, whom Kill hired onto his staff at Northern Illinois before either was a household name, for being an overly ambitious phony who cared about himself more than his players.
“I just think sometimes, ego gets carried away,” Kill said during a SiriusXM radio interview. “When he went into Minnesota and treated the people the way he treated my guys and telling ‘em he had to go in and completely change the culture, and it was a bad culture and bad people, you know, he made it sound like we didn’t know what we were doing, and I took it personal.
“You just don’t treat people that have been with you and helped your career and you don’t even talk to him, you know, once you get the job.”
To be sure, Fleck’s antics can be grating at times, stomping up and down the sidelines after routine plays and trademarking “Row The Boat” like some latter-day Red McCombs purple people bleeder.
However, to Fleck’s credit, he has taken and maintained a glide path on the high road while Kill last week turned 61 going on 6.
“There's a tradition of 100 years ago of coaches meeting at midfield,” Fleck recently told reporters. “I've been a head coach for 10 years, and I've never not shaken a head coach's hand in my entire career … I might have had to go find a guy.”
Here’s the deal. Kill posted a 14-21 Big Ten record in his four-plus seasons with the Gophers. He went to three bowl games and lost them all. Moreover, Kill is 0-5 in bowl games.
Anyone clutching their pearls and bemoaning Kill got a raw deal in Minnesota is misguided at best and disingenuous at worst.
Fleck, meanwhile, is 35-23 and undefeated in the three bowl games to which he has taken the Gophers. He’s also seized Paul Bunyon’s Axe twice from Wisconsin, which Kill could never do.
Fleck has raised the bar of expectations in Dinkytown while Kill insists on being a dink.
Row, row, row your boat, Jerry, gently down the stream. Warily, warily, warily life has had enough of your screams.
Related: Brian Murphy: Kevin O'Connell is kicking the Vikings' hornet's nest of fate
