The Wisconsin Badgers woke up on the feast of Stephen and noticed that the Minnesota Golden Gophers — who will try to spend the 2020s bumping the Badgers off their perch atop the Big Ten West — don’t have an offensive coordinator for the time being. Kirk Ciarrocca, who has been with P.J. Fleck at Western Michigan and Minnesota, left the Gophers to join James Franklin at Penn State.
Coaching moves aren’t guaranteed to succeed or fail, but on the surface of things, the fact that Fleck will have to change coordinators after several years with a trusted lieutenant seems suboptimal for the Gophers. More than the loss of continuity on his staff, though, Fleck has to deal with the reality that Ciarrocca generally developed wide receivers:
Biggest thing that jumps out to me looking at Kirk Ciarrocca's offenses from a numbers perspective is WR production.
Penn State has had one 1000-yd season from a WR in Franklin's tenure.
In same time frame as an OC, Ciarrocca has produced seven such seasons.
— David Eckert (@davideckert98) December 26, 2019
The Badgers saw Ciarrocca’s offense before Ciarrocca went to Minnesota. Wisconsin played — and contained — Ciarrocca’s offense in the 2017 Cotton Bowl when P.J. Fleck was at Western Michigan. Watching Ciarrocca stay in the Big Ten Conference is not a good thing for Wisconsin. Watching Ciarrocca leave the Big Ten West, however, is definitely a good thing for the Badgers. Minnesota needs every ounce of leverage it can get in its burgeoning battle with the Badgers for Big Ten West supremacy. Maybe Fleck will somehow find a coordinator on par with Ciarrocca. Yet, given how successful Fleck has been the past several years with Ciarrocca by his side, this surely isn’t what Fleck had in mind for his offseason. It is not what he planned or hoped for.
Could Fleck successfully adjust? If he is the caliber of coach many people think he is, he will… but we don’t know just how good Fleck is. We are only beginning to get a fuller measure of him, and given how thoroughly he got schooled by Jim Leonhard and Paul Chryst a month ago, anything which disrupts Minnesota’s momentum is a genuine threat to a sustained Fleck ascendance in Minneapolis. Stay tuned for Minnesota’s hire of a replacement for Kirk Ciarrocca. The Big Ten coaching carousel season just became a lot more interesting.