Kill has said that fair evaluation of a recruit is after 4-5 months and you really won’t know for two years. That’s a fair assessment and one I think applies to head coaches as well. First impression of Tim Brewster was all upbeat as it seemed everything that was coming out of the Nagurski-Gibson Complex was positive and seemingly a breath of fresh air. But once the class of 2010 started making their list of top 5 schools and Minnesota was not on those lists then you realized that the ride was coming to an end.
Jerry Kill has been the head coach of the Gophers for about 3 months so let’s put him under the microscope and look at his pros and cons for our first impression.
Pros:
Kill’s staff is always studying other programs’ best practices so they are always trying to improve
They are able to have plenty of kids attend junior days and have kids visiting from other states (at least more than Brew and Mase were able to attract)
The staff really wants to do their due diligence to make sure the players they bring in fit the profile of what they want in a recruit. I’m guessing that the number of transfers and spring/summer brushes with the law will decrease significantly.
Even though he knows what he eventually wants his offense to be, he’s willing to adapt to the strengths of the players they currently have and recruit to what they want to do. At least they are stating that publicly.
I have a strong feeling that Kill will make the players work harder than they have in recent years
He is well respected in the coaching community
He has turned around 4 football programs in the last 17 years and has won at the high school, NAIA, D2, FCS and the FBS level. It makes sense that if we are going to take a chance, that we use it on him. Southern Illinois was essentially the Minnesota of the Gateway Conference, with a 20 year dry spell without a making the playoffs or a conference title and had 11 straight losing seasons and had five coaches try and fail to right the ship. That feels painfully familiar.
He has landed a Rivals 250 watch in-state player (McDonald) over an Iowa
Kill will make sure his players grow up to be fine upstanding members of the community and will stress the importance of academics
Kill will give the players an identity and mental toughness and teach them dedication and perseverance.
It looks like DC Tracy Claeys will be more aggressive on defense. I don’t think we’re talking about Tim Brewster saying we’re going to be more aggressive and then not back it up, but rather turn our DE’s loose and get after it aggressive. Kill’s teams have been known to be good on defense and I’m looking forward to the Gopher defense stopping teams on 3rd down and abandoning the bend but don’t break philosophy that has hung around Dinkytown for longer than I care to remember.
Cons:
Kill isn’t a polished guy and I like that in a head coach. Just like I wasn’t a fan of Bo Pellini getting the HC gig after Mase I’m not a fan of the Kansas drawl and I like to feel that the HC of my favorite team is much smarter than me. The fact that Kill said that there are a bunch of HS coaches that could probably do his job. Then why are we paying him $1 million a year?
He had one good year at NIU. Many people have said that Kill “turned around the program” at NIU. But in reality Joe Novak retired and was not fired. Yes Novak’s 2007 team finished 2-10, but prior to that his teams were 7-6 (Poinsetta Bowl), 7-5, 9-3 (Silicon Valley Bowl), 10-2 and 8-4. NIU suffered a large amount of injuries in the 2007 season which is generally viewed as the reason why the team lost so many close games. This was not a program in disarray. If anything Kill’s 2010 record of 11-3 is more of a reflection of what was a typical season at NIU under Novak as opposed to a breakthrough moment for Kill.
Driven by a no-nonsense, lunch pail approach which can overcome many things, but not superior talent like Ohio State, Nebraska, etc. Yes it is refreshing change of pace from Brew but I don’t think it is going to put us over the top.
Kill didn’t bring Tom Matukewicz to Dinkytown. In a sea of vanilla is Coach Tuke, who just before NIU’s bowl game was asked what he knew about opponent Fresno State a month ago. His response? “Pat Hill has a sweet mustache.” Hill is the Fresno State HC. I would have enjoyed this kind of guy on the staff.
Jerry Kill is not going to be known as a great recruiter. Joe Novak had the #2 MAC recruiting class in 2004 and tied for the #1 class in 2005, #7 in 2006 and the 2007 class fell apart upon Novak’s retirement. In 2008, Kill’s first class, they only brought in 13 players so the class was last in the MAC. In 2009 NIU had the #7 rated MAC class. Being located so close to a hotbed of talent should have meant that NIU would easily be rated highly amongst its peers but it wasn’t. Ohio produces more D1 signees per year than Chicagoland but it is also more heavily recruited by BCS schools and there are more Ohio MAC schools (6) than Chicago area MAC level schools (2). During the Kill years there were several players who “got away” and many NIU fans thought that Kill still had a ways to go in terms of recruiting Chicago.
“Recruiting is recruiting” – this quote really irks me. I understand that many of the processes of recruiting to NIU are the same as recruiting to Minnesota. Kid sends video to you, you talk to his coach and you talk to him on the phone. If you think his skill set matches what you want to do on the field then you offer him. You establish a relationship and if he likes you the best he picks your program. Yes, that’s all the same. But at the BCS level many blue chip kids don’t want to tryout at a summer camp to earn an offer since they already have offers from Schools X, Y & Z. In the day and age of Rivals, recruiting has a bright spotlight shining down pointing out every triumph and every weakness. Schools can easily find out who has offered a kid and who hasn’t. Ask a coach like Glen Mason if recruiting is recruiting, when you are expected to compete against schools like Michigan and Ohio State that have national exposure where a kid knows all about them and nothing about your program.
If you were a recruit from Florida would you pick Minnesota or Ohio State? Vanderbilt or Tennessee? Iowa State or Nebraska? What if you had to choose between NIU, Akron and Miami-Ohio off the top of your head? Do you know how well those schools have performed lately? Name me the head coaches at two of the three. At NIU you do have to compete against bigger schools for recruits and once in a while your best recruits get poached by a bigger fish. But you aren’t expected to compete with those bigger fish on the gridiron or the recruiting trail, whereas at Minnesota you are expected to do both on an annual basis.
Kill doesn’t care about star ratings for recruits, which is fine but many people do. Blue chip recruits want to play with other blue chip recruits. If your recruiting isn’t seen as being great, then you probably won’t get any great players that do not have some kind of prior connection to the U. I understand that you can’t just recruit stars, and that your recruits need to fit into your schemes. But often times perception is reality and if you are perceived as having a solid class then you’ll get solid recruits to join it. If you are over/under performing on the recruiting trail then you can expect to finish the class with the same type of players.
Conclusion:
If I had to make a guess today as to how Kill’s tenure at Minnesota will turn out, I would say it would be Mason-esque, going to lower level bowl games every now and then and fans complaining that we could do better if we just could recruit better. I don’t see Kill bringing in better recruits than what is currently on the roster and maybe a notch lower. But they will be better suited to Kill’s systems and the current roster isn’t fully transformed by S&C coach Eric Kleinsince it takes about three years so they will probably play as well in 2014 as they do in 2011. Making a prediction of 2011 before the spring game, fall camp and before any injuries occur I will predict the Gophers finish with 5.5 wins which means a 50/50 chance of going bowling.
After last season, I’ll take it. And this is just an early prediction and will likely change as we get more information that pertains to how Kill is doing at Minnesota and not guesses as to how he’ll do based on past performance at other programs.
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