Inside: Gophers' Danny Collins' season spent sleeping in a janitor closet

Danny Collins has been working under P.J. Fleck for more than a decade. When he was hired as the Gophers' new defensive coordinator in January, it was revealed that he spent one of those seasons sleeping in a janitorial closet. Fleck has referenced it multiple t imes throughout the offseason, and we got some more details on Monday.

"It was a year that I had just graduated from Western Michigan University. I thought that I was going to have an opportunity to be a GA (graduate assistant). It wasn't my time to be a GA yet," Collins said. "I decided to volunteer. I remember calling my parents, saying, 'This Coach Fleck, he's a special guy,' and I'm going to attach myself to him, and I am just going to prove to them that I have what it takes."

Collins graduated from Western Michigan in 2014 with a degree in general studies. He didn't become a defensive graduate assistant until 2015, so that 2014 season was the year he volunteered for the team.

"[I] didn't make any money [coaching] that year, so there are not a lot of places you can live with that, so I lived in the football facility on the fourth floor there, one of the coach's storage offices," he continued. "I just said this was going to be an opportunity for me. I'm always going to be the last one to leave and the first one here, simple as that. You're always going to see me in this buildi ng. I am always going to be working, so I did that for a whole season."

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Collins said it was a "fairly big" storage closet, and he had a little air mattress, all of his clothes, and a car. He "was pretty much set" to grind his way up the coaching ranks.

"I worked at FedEx and stocked trucks; that was my only way to make money. That was from midnight to 4 a.m., weird shifts like that... That year, I learned a lot about myself and how much the human body can take, mentally, physically, and all that, the grind to ultimately get your dream," he said.

Collins was a defensive graduate assistant for the Broncos from 2015-16 before following Fleck to Minnesota. It wasn't until the 2020 season where he was promoted to senior defensive analyst, a role he held for two seasons. He became the safeti es coach in 2022, which is a position he has specialized in ever since.

Collins is Minnesota's third different defensive coordinator in three seasons. The defense is not expected to change much from a schematic standpoint, but it's hard to argue there's someone who deserves to call plays more than Collins.