Watch as Minnesota head football coach P.J. Fleck meets with the media ahead of the Golden Gophers week six matchup against the USC Trojans.

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It was hard fought game in the second-half for our players and showed a lot of resiliency and congratulations to Michigan on the victory. That's what rivalry games are supposed to look like down to the end and got to give a lot of credit. They made a lot more plays than we did in the first half.

It was a tale of two halves. Unfortunately, we've had, you know, two of those games where it's been a tale of two halves. You know, we haven't played 60 total minutes of really elite football yet, which is gives us hope and excitement as we keep going forward. I said this before I said you have to be, I think really good at losing to continue to find ways to win and I’m not accepting losing what I'm saying that is you have to understand when you do lose it you're going to learn the most and our players have, I can't give them enough credit for how hard they played in the second-half.

The resiliency they showed because that's going to stay with them through life. That's going to stay through them as husbands and fathers and adults, leaders of their family. When they go through really, really dark and tragic and hard times. I mean that. That showed what type of character those guys have, and they've always done that, and that's what I admired about them. I told them in at after the game, how proud of him I was and our staff, how proud of the staff I was. But I also told them yesterday, I said now listen. You take that moment and you capture that moment in the locker room, and then you move on to Sunday to learn and I said, sometimes when you get to that point, you know, we're over moral victories. I think you can all understand that about me, that there are no moral victories and when you get are getting told, you know, like, man, that was such a great fight. Oh, that was so amazing from the external. Which is fine. You can have that in the moment. But then after that that can be just as much rat poisoning as winning a game that game and being patted on the back of great job. We needed to be able to learn from yesterday from Saturday, yesterday and be able to move on and I thought our guys did an unbelievable job of that. I think they've handled everything with class and played their hearts out and I couldn't be more proud of them.

The end of the day, winnings the objective, and we didn't do that simple and it took 60 some plays on both sides of the ball to get to that last play. Every play tells its own story. As I said in the press conference after the game, not one play will ever lose you a game. But I do believe that one play can win you a game, but it's not just one play. That's why every play tells its own individual story. we've got to be better in those things we did not win 78%, and that's the story of the game. We were -1 in the takeaway battle. We didn't win the turnover battle, didn't win the tackling battle and the explosive plays were pretty close in the run and pass. We had a fumble that turned into seven points for them. We had a block punt, which turned in for seven points for them. We had a missed field goal.

Now they had some errors too. You liste to Coach Moore. Talk about how bad they played, right and there's two sides of that. You look at the Georgia, Alabama game, Georgia down 30-7 at half time. Who would have thought that, like it's college football, Jim Tressel told me a long time ago. As I said, why do you coach college? Well, because you never know what's going to happen, and that's exactly the way he said and walked away, and the ball's not round.

We did some unbelievable things in that game in the return game with Koi Perich had an unbelievable punt return and shows how explosive he can be. We executed a bonsai perfectly at the very end of the first half and that's exactly how that drive should have been and ended.

You don't have enough time to technically get that snap off. You can't clock it because it's under three seconds and we practice that play. Once a day, every day for the last 12 years, and I've used it twice. That's situational football. When you look at situational football T2 end of half, end of game, bonsai situations, I think our team has been really strong in situational football of things that might be overlooked, but they've done an unbelievable job of winning a lot of the situational football.

Other than that, not exactly, you know, pleased with obviously the outcome of the game in terms of win loss. But I think our team showed what they're made of and showed what kind of how much fun this is going to be the next seven games and that's what it's all about. You give yourself a best chance to win. Now, we got to put 60 minutes of football together and that is my job. The head football coaches job is to make sure your team plays the best from the kickoff till the final buzzer. That's my job and I'm solely responsible for that and it's my job to get it fixed and my job to get the most out of these players. So with that said, leave it up for questions.

Just execution. It's one guy here. It's one guy there. It's a hold here or a false start there. It's behind the chains. It's a finishing of a block. It's communication up front. But you know, we're going to be really good at running the football and we can be really good at running football. We are really good at running football, but we can’t force ourselves.

It's a great question because we're forcing ourselves to get away from it sooner than we want to get away from it. We’re forcing ourselves, whether that's by turning the ball over, you know, giving up scores on on defense. Getting away from our game plan because of, you know, drives that are going against us on defense, on the offensive side, we're dropping the ball, putting ourselves in a tough position. We can't just say, OK, we're going to establish a run and just do it and then go three and out, three and out, three and out. Why would I do that?

Right. I mean, so we have to listen to what we're good at, what we're good at now and then watch practice of what we're getting. Better. At and then go get better at it and then go execute it better in a game and that's what's fun about being able to go through the season because you want to get better. Your team should get better and I'm watching us get better at a lot of things. But again, we're making too many. Small. In terms of play numbers catastrophic, when you look at the game.

I think I think it's two things. I think we were really disciplined in a lot of ways that people look at a false start and all on discipline. We did a lot of things in that game where we had to be able to switch snap counts up, move, snap counts up, especially on short yardage stuff of what we were going to do, whether it was fake claps, multiple claps, whether it was under center and it was. You know, freeze cadence and they did a really good job of that, but it's a flinch here or a flinch there. How we're getting to that got to give Michigan fans a lot of credit. You know, you know, we had, we had too many. Again I think when you look at the amount of penalties we have, we're used to being the least penalized team in the country. So when you start comparing yourself to yourself, anything. Anything below #1 in the country? And it's disappointing because that's how we play. Football. Now there's people have 17, 16 penalties a game like we're not, we're not undisciplined. We're just making some mistakes in some critical situations and we got to be better at that and be more disciplined just within those situations. And I think some of them are, are really, really close. There's been times where I thought you know, OK, they were in the neutral zone first and we moved and we got called for a false start. But you know there's things like that that come up and you got to really analyze that and look at and move on."

Everything. I mean, he's a he's a gunslinger. I mean, he can throw it around. It's one thing to be a gunslinger. It's another thing to be a gunslinger that's accurate. He's throwing for over 70% completion percentage. And it's not just on screens, and I mean, he's throwing through windows that are about that big, he's agile. He can move, he can run. You can tell that he is a football player first and a quarterback second because he loves the game, and he makes everybody else around him better. Now they got four to five receivers, they’re all big. They can all create space. They can all run flat out fly. Their offensive line is the biggest we played all year and they run the football. I mean, they run the football with, they're running multiple running backs, a lot of counter, a lot of pullers, and they're big and physical. I think one thing, Lincoln's really done a great job of as he's gone through his career is he's running the ball more effectively than he ever has, and he's not running it just to break the throwing streaks. He's running it with effectiveness to run the football and it's been, you know, I've studied him for a lot of years, just watching what he's done in Oklahoma and USC and he's part of, I think, part of that generation that's kind of reinvented the game of his offensive mind and what he's been able to do.

I have a ton of respect for him and you can tell by how hard these guys play on offense and on defense. You know, they've got a lot of things that have a lot of similarities to the team we just played, you know, their coordinator comes a little bit from that, the Wink (Martindale) tree. They do have a lot of similarities, they’re different but they're an aggressive style of defense, and they've got corners that are all 6-2, 6-3 and long. They got a linebacker at 6-6. They got a really stout up front defensive line and you look at that Michigan game, I mean, they're one play away from winning that game and it's the last final seconds of, you know, basically a 1 yard run.

So, I mean, they're really good football team. I mean they're highly ranked team. This is our you know, second straight week of playing a top 12 team and that's the fun thing about the new Big 10.

Yeah, I don't care who it's against. We talked about starting fast, accelerate in the middle, win the middle eight and then finish strong period. I mean that is our standard and we know it too. I think, you know, you all have the stats and you all have the percentages and that's part of your. Your job is to find that what we're not doing well and I can appreciate that because we're not doing it well. The key is execution. It sounds generic. It sounds boring, but it's true. We have a drop here. We have a miss protection here. We have a, you know, we have an early fumble. We have something that gets us off our row, our rhythm, right, and I don't believe in momentum and I think that we've allowed momentum to creep in here and there and rely on that.

I told our players that yesterday I said that's why we don't believe in it. We're dictating our own tempo of what we want to execute on offense and we've got to start way faster. We got starting faster on defense so, you know, we're down 21-0 before we know it. That changes us so many things. When you're playing a top 12 team guys and it's self-inflicted. However, I know we have to have a block punt and a fumble, but our defense we talk about as a team, I don't care, we play defense for 100 yards, 120 yards. You know 53-1/3 the width of the field, period. It doesn't matter where they get the boat. We gotta hold them to field goals and you know, I think our defense takes a lot of pride in that. Unfortunately, you know, they have 14 points where it could have been possibly 6. Even when it went really wrong, we still could have been able to stop the bleeding and we weren't able to do that.

Here's what I'll say about that. I had a conversation with the Big 10 Commissioner and the officials. They are reviewing it and we expect to hear something this afternoon. So that's all say about the last play.

Well, we've done it. We've done it part of our game plan hasn't been ever. It's never been a just a reaction. We've done it in the first half. We've done in the second quarter. We've done it in the fourth quarter. We've done it in two-minute drill and we have a lot of tempos, right?

We can go at a two minute rate, which is very different, right than a four minute rate, right? There's a 2 minute rate, then there's a, there's a, there's a kind of a NASCAR rate, right? Then there's an IndyCar pace like we have all these paces that we can go at based on the flow of the game. We've gotten to it early. We've done it early and then we haven't had success. We've done it early and had success, but the whole point is to mix it in and out strategically for us to have an advantage. It's not meant to be just a reaction. Start of the second-half. We're not in two-minute, but we had to be able to speed the tempo up cause we're down 18 points. We're down three scores. We had to move it a little bit faster rate, but it wasn't the rate, it was the execution. It. The flow, the pace of the game. If we thought that our team was the best team and hurry up, we just hurry up the whole time and if we thought that was the best thing to do, we would do that. We've believed that it's to sprinkle it now. Do we sprinkle it a little more? Do we sprinkle a little less? I think those are the questions you have to ask, but it's more of the execution because when we aren't going at that type of pace, we're playing really good football too. But then we're also playing really bad football. When we do go at that rate. Ther’s times we're doing really well, and then there's times with 13 seconds off the clock we just ran 3 plays and now we punt right back and our defense is back on the field. So it's all game plan. It's all based on, you want it to be more response with your own team then reaction to the other team and right now it, we're not able to do it in terms of on our own control, but we're able to do it when we have to react and that's the execution piece that we got to get fixed.

Keep rowing, man. Baseball terms keep swinging. Right. Chopping the tree down. Keep chopping, and kicking terms, keep kicking it. Just do it better. That's that. That's the message I believe in him 100% guys, most of his field goals are outside 50 yards. That's how much I trust him. And you know, I make a joke like I'm 55 yards is that's a tough field goal for anybody. But he can make it or I wouldn't put him out there. I watch him every day in practice. This is just like I go back to Major League Baseball. Some of us love baseball, and I think Aaron Judge is getting booed at the beginning of the year. Am I right? Like there was a first month of baseball, wasn’t Aaron Judge having a hard time? But now he's close to 60 home runs. The Yankees are doing pretty good. Great players, that doesn't mean that they're not going to go through their own struggles. And I believe in him wholeheartedly. And I'm going to continue to believe in him and I'm going to continue to do that. That's my faith and belief in my team and I'll always do that because I see what he does on a daily basis and you've all seen what he can do, he'll get it right. I know he’ll get it right.

I think it's just the way how hard our guys are playing. I think when you see some of the things that we're doing on the special teams part, some of them really hustle mistakes. I mean some of the things that we're doing are our hustle mistakes. I just love how hard those guys play and I think we're playing as hard, if not harder than we ever have.

Koi, I told you this before, Koi is bigger than you think. You can look at his height and weight, but he's, he's got a great instinct for football. Just in general. He's always smiling. He's got that Antoine smile and that love for the game. You can put him out there as a true freshman. Nothing intimidates him and he's dangerous the ball in his hand. So that's the best way we can find to do and not put too much on his plate as a true freshman. Right now, he's playing defense. He's playing special teams. He just got here. June and when you actually go up to him and you kind of hit him on the shoulder, he's very, very dense. I mean, he is incredibly strong and he hasn't been through our program for a whole year yet and I think he can break tackles. He sees the field really well, everybody's blocking their tail off for him. If you give him a little bit of space, I think he could be really dangerous and I watched him do it all through high school. I mean multiple games. One of them I was at personally and I think you had four touchdowns in the first quarter. I mean, he's running right by me, rowing the boat and talking me on, you know, as he's talking to me as he's running. Right. He just he loves the game and that's the joy that he plays with. But when you get around his mom and dad like you can see where that comes from and they just have. let their boys just like live life as boys, you know and it's fun and refreshing and they do a really good job of raising their kids and Koi, he's a phenomenal football player.

But it's all 11 because they're all working their tail end off to give them a crease and again punt returns all about levels. You know, if you got one wall coming down to tackle you, it's hard to be able to make that our guys are disrupting the punt team at different levels. Which are allowing creases which are allowing him to be able to break a tackle. See the field a little bit better. Get up the field. Make the first guy miss and then you can see what he does with the ball in his hand so you know as we move forward, you know he's a guy that's going to be really, really dynamic for us in every aspect of the game.

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