Gophers head coach P.J. Fleck said that while injuries have taken their toll on his team, there are “no excuses” for the defense in the 49-30 loss to Purdue Saturday.
The Gophers proved unable to stop the Purdue run game, gave up some big plays through the air, and only forced the home team to punt a handful of times.
When asked what the issues were for his team, Fleck said: “Everything. What were the issues? Everything. Listen, there’s no excuses. I mean, coaches stand up here and we give interviews and everybody does their articles and then they say, ‘It’s an excuse for this.’ There’s reasons there’s no excuses.
“I’m proud of the way we finished on offense, but defensively, I mean, 600 yards of offense is not good enough,” he added. “That’s completely unacceptable. Period, any way you slice it, cut it, there is no silver lining in 600 yards of offense.”
“But you’ve got to give them credit. They played really well tonight, and we did not. But again, there’s reasons, not excuses, but there’s reasons why. That’s why I’m not discouraged. I know those guys are going to be really good players one day. They’re just not there yet, and they’re forced into a position to play.”
Fleck went on to say that his team had been struggling with injuries and a lack of depth.
“We’re decimated right now the linebacker position,” he said. “We’ve got some guys playing at that position right now who haven’t played college football. We’ve got some guys who are freshmen, true freshmen. Kingsbury played tonight as a true freshman. That’s not where we want to be. We’ve got some depth issues. We had to stay healthy at that position for us to have success on defense this year, in my opinion. We didn’t.”
Fleck has previously said that the Gophers are struggling to compete with other colleges for recruits in the NIL era, and will continue to lose out without more funding flowing in.
“We talked about this before, just in college football in general, depth, okay, some teams have it, some teams don’t. Right now we’re not the deepest team. The depth is young.”
“Bad game, not a bad life, not a bad program, not a bad team, just bad game,” he added. “Unfortunately it all kind of unraveled for us a little bit tonight.”
