Western Michigan is one of the great Cinderellas of this college football season. The Broncos are 13-0 heading into Monday’s Cotton Bowl against Wisconsin (1 p.m. ET, ESPN), for which they were picked as the non-power conferences’ rep in this year’s New Year’s Six bowls. A program from the MAC that went 1-11 just three years ago is playing in the second-highest rung of bowl games, right behind the Playoff.
P.J. Fleck is the boat-rowing centerpiece of WMU’s Cotton Bowl rise
The Broncos are in the New Year’s Six because a unique young coach has pushed them to new heights.
Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports
The central figure in WMU’s football rise is its 36-year-old head coach, P.J. Fleck. He got to Kalamazoo before the 2013 season, with just seven years of college coaching under his belt. He’d been a graduate assistant at Ohio State in 2006, then a receivers coach over the next few years at Northern Illinois, Rutgers, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
WMU hired him as its 15th head coach in December 2012, replacing Bill Cubit after a 4-8 season.
Fleck’s first team was not good, posting that 1-11 mark before embarking on its current rocket ship ride. In total, he’s 30-21 at WMU, including 29-10 in the last three years. This undefeated season landed Fleck in the middle of coaching rumors for open jobs like Oregon and Purdue, and other jobs that never opened at all. Fleck’s not having left WMU yet doesn’t mean he’ll never go, of course, but it’s great news for the Broncos that he appears to be sticking around a little bit longer.
Fleck’s WMU teams are best known for their brilliant offenses. The Broncos have scored 44 points per game this year, after 36 last year, 34 the year before that, and 17 – one of the worst marks in the country – the year before that. The progression from Year 1 to Year 2 was huge, and WMU’s been steadily building something good ever since. His defenses have improved, too, from his arrival until now.
WMU’s growth has been a triumph of player development. The Broncos’ key offensive contributors have gotten better over time. Senior quarterback Zach Terrell has been a multiyear project, and he’s grown alongside three senior receivers who together get about 80 percent of WMU’s targets. One of those, Corey Davis, has developed to the point where he could be a first- or second-round NFL pick this spring.
The program’s national profile has grown a great deal in just the last year. Kalamazoo hosted ESPN’s College GameDay for the first time in November, when the Broncos hosted Buffalo in their second-to-last regular season game.
Fleck’s team-building mantra — row the boat — has become a popular rallying cry and recruiting tool, known far and wide throughout the college football internet. He views rowing the boat as a holistic approach to life and football, which entails things like community service as much as it entails being good at a sport.
Not that the rowing of the boat doesn’t extend to the gridiron, because it does. Hear it from Davis, one of the best mid-major receivers in modern times:
”I kind of wish I knew ‘row the boat’ when I was a little kid. Whatever adversity you’re facing, just keep pushing, keep going through it. You can’t control the past, you can only learn from it.
Fleck’s been recruiting the best classes in the MAC for years, giving himself a serious edge on his competition. He pushes his players hard once he has them. It’s worked.
Fleck’s an interesting dude. But he’s good at what he does.
To a large degree, “interesting” is just a synonym here for “energetic.”
How interesting is Fleck? Here he is in full pads doing a drill against a player, then cutting to a custom-made video involving Sylvester Stallone:
And here is Fleck crowd-surfing in the locker room after winning the MAC and basically clinching this Cotton Bowl berth:
Fleck’s considerably more boisterous, at least in public, than the vast majority of major college football coaches. He’s also younger than almost all of his head coach peers. In what’s often a buttoned-up, tense world, Fleck is intense but not boring.
If Fleck didn’t win, his style would probably open him up to considerable criticism. He’d be called arrogant, because there’s nothing this sport’s old guard likes less than fun personalities who fail. But the thing about Fleck is that he does win, and his style has apparently been a boon to WMU’s recruiting. That’s part of how he wins.
Fleck is probably not like your team’s coach, but that’s OK. He’s successful in his own way, with his own approach and his own boat.
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