Gophers football dares to dream of what's ahead

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"Gophers junior safety Cedric Thompson grew so exasperated watching Michigan State outplay Ohio State in this month’s Big Ten Championship Game, he took to Twitter with a bold prediction:

“I promise YOU the Minnesota Golden Gophers will be in this game next year. I PROMISE!” Thompson tweeted (@Cedmalu), encouraging his 600-plus followers to mark those words.

The enthusiasm inside the football program is palpable, as the Gophers have improved from 3-9 to 6-7 to 8-4 in the first three years under Jerry Kill. This Friday, they play Syracuse in the Texas Bowl, with a chance to reach nine victories for only the second time since 1905.

The question now is, will this success continue? Are the improved records under Kill part of a trend that can eventually lead to 10, 11 even 12 wins? Kill’s staff and his players clearly believe the answer is yes."

http://www.startribune.com/sports/gophers/236893161.html?page=all&prepage=1&c=y#continue
 

First off DiNardo has very little good to say generally about us so F him. Second, we built a great stadium and have fallen behind in some other areas. OK, but we needed the stadium first so it is what is is. I'm sure the fellas are living a pretty good life regardless and over time we will catch up with the Joneses as much as we need to.
 

Two things. First, in my opinion, DiNardo has had a fairly realistic attitude about the Gophers. He hasn't hyped us (for sure) but he also hasn't dissed us. As far as his analysis of our facilities, he's absolutely correct. Second, the comparison of Kill's ceiling to Mason is a fair one. Kill has not yet demonstrated that he can coach way above expectations at an FBS school. Neither the success of his successors at NIU or an 8 - 4 record in year three proves that.

I think this is where the experts are dead wrong. I fully expect Kill to control himself and to manage his epilepsy. Equally importantly, I expect him to far exceed Mason's ceiling as a head coach. I really do expect coach Kill to be one of those very rare gem's of a coach. Furthermore, I expect him to stay right here. A big victory next week will be the next good indication and will go a long way toward solidifying this year's recruiting efforts.
 

I think the 2 biggest differences between Mason and Kill are in game coaching skill/ability and recruiting.

Mason recruited some stars, and he had one year here, and one year there where everything seemed to kind of come together, 99 and 03, but what that is basically evidence of, is poor recruiting basically. Sustained success in football requires a team with depth. Too many times I've had to express the same thing as other Gopher fans, "oh, we lost one of our key players, our #1 WR, or our best DB or yada yada yada", but all teams suffer injuries, but not all teams suck like we do because of those injuries. This is partly because they had depth. A rare example from our own program would be at RB, Kirkwood went down early and his replacement did fine until he went down and then Cobb moved up and did great.

Mason never seemed to develop any significant amount of depth on his rosters. His teams were too susceptible to injury.

So far, and granted we are only 3 years in, but so far it seems like Kill is already bringing in the right personnel and developing some depth. If I am right about this, this will be what will separate him from the Mason's of the world. Instead of having 2 good seasons that resulted in decent but still not major bowls, Kill will get to those kinds of bowl games every year, and when he has his 2 good seasons, they could be Rose Bowl seasons. And once you start getting to decent bowl games every year, and to a Rose Bowl just once, recruiting will really start to pick up.


And this is also where the other factor that so far seems to separate Kill and Mason comes in. Mason found himself in several situations where he had games won, or was in a position to win games, but in the end, he lost those close games, leaving us to talk about how many close calls we had and what could have been, or how on earth could he have lost that game(Michigan, NCSU & TT games).

So far Kill has shown that he makes good adjustments at halftime, and even in many of the games they lost, they outscored the other team in the 2nd half, and I do not know of a single game where we led at halftime, that we didn't go on to win. Now Mason didn't have any of those big embarrassing losses in his first 3 years, so its almost not fair to compare them in this way at this point, but I have a strong feeling that in another 5-6 years, we'll be able to look back and see that my suspicions were right on in this regard. There is no way on earth that I believe Jerry Kill will give up a 20+ pt lead in a game like Mason did several times.



Long term that will make a huge difference.
 

I always get a kick out of the national or external patronizing viewpoints that the Gophers should just be content go to back to Mason-like football. Isn't that cute, MN wants to win some games? The thing is even if the squad does go back to Mason-like levels and happen to cross out repeated historic collapse losses, that equals at least a couple Rose Bowls and Dinardo and others might have to quit patting them on the head and actually be impressed, really impressed. Time will tell.
 


PartoPitinosPosse said:
I think the 2 biggest differences between Mason and Kill are in game coaching skill/ability and recruiting.

Mason recruited some stars, and he had one year here, and one year there where everything seemed to kind of come together, 99 and 03, but what that is basically evidence of, is poor recruiting basically. Sustained success in football requires a team with depth. Too many times I've had to express the same thing as other Gopher fans, "oh, we lost one of our key players, our #1 WR, or our best DB or yada yada yada", but all teams suffer injuries, but not all teams suck like we do because of those injuries. This is partly because they had depth. A rare example from our own program would be at RB, Kirkwood went down early and his replacement did fine until he went down and then Cobb moved up and did great.

Mason never seemed to develop any significant amount of depth on his rosters. His teams were too susceptible to injury.

So far, and granted we are only 3 years in, but so far it seems like Kill is already bringing in the right personnel and developing some depth. If I am right about this, this will be what will separate him from the Mason's of the world. Instead of having 2 good seasons that resulted in decent but still not major bowls, Kill will get to those kinds of bowl games every year, and when he has his 2 good seasons, they could be Rose Bowl seasons. And once you start getting to decent bowl games every year, and to a Rose Bowl just once, recruiting will really start to pick up.


And this is also where the other factor that so far seems to separate Kill and Mason comes in. Mason found himself in several situations where he had games won, or was in a position to win games, but in the end, he lost those close games, leaving us to talk about how many close calls we had and what could have been, or how on earth could he have lost that game(Michigan, NCSU & TT games).

So far Kill has shown that he makes good adjustments at halftime, and even in many of the games they lost, they outscored the other team in the 2nd half, and I do not know of a single game where we led at halftime, that we didn't go on to win. Now Mason didn't have any of those big embarrassing losses in his first 3 years, so its almost not fair to compare them in this way at this point, but I have a strong feeling that in another 5-6 years, we'll be able to look back and see that my suspicions were right on in this regard. There is no way on earth that I believe Jerry Kill will give up a 20+ pt lead in a game like Mason did several times.



Long term that will make a huge difference.
Click to expand...

That is because Kill knows that defense wins games. Mason never liked recruiting and as as result he especially never emphasized recruiting for the defense. Kill's approach is just the opposite of Mason's, i.e he knows that it starts with recruiting and defense. Mason might still be coaching today if he was willing to do what Kill does when it comes to recruiting.
 

Killjoy said:
That is because Kill knows that defense wins games. Mason never liked recruiting and as as result he especially never emphasized recruiting for the defense. Kill's approach is just the opposite of Mason's, i.e he knows that it starts with recruiting and defense. Mason might still be coaching today if he was willing to do what Kill does when it comes to recruiting.
Click to expand...

Mason was here for 10 seasons boys and girls. I hope Kill is here for much longer than 10 seasons. He has seven more to go before he reaches that "TEN YEAR" tenure that has been such a rare accomplishment for U of M coaches other than Bernie, Murray and Glen during the past fifty years plus.

When Kill has survived here at the U for his first ten...we can add up his conference wins and his conference losses and then...ONLY THEN...can we determine which coach was the better coach. I am rooting for Kill to blow Mason out of the water with his Conference win totals. That would mean that I'll get to watch some pretty damn good Golden Gopher Conference Showings during these next seven years!

But, being the realist that I am when it comes to conference wins vs conference losses, Kill is going to have to actually get the wins and have them written in the Conference Record Books before I will just award him that great distinction. Every conference win helps...every conference loss hurts Kill the same way that every conference win helped and every conference loss hurt Mason.

I think Mason did a damn fine job in a tough situation. So far, I think Kill has been doing a damn fine job in a tough situation. Only time...and the conference record books will tell us who will win this contest boys and girls... The next seven years should really be interesting...don't you all think? And, it will be one Conference game at a time that will provide the answer that we MUST eventually find to be TRUTH...the WHOLE truth...and NOTHING but the truth. This thing will be settled once and for ever during the next seven Conference seasons. Border Battles...Conference finishes...bowl game results will ALL play a vital role in determining IF Kill was better than Mason OR if Mason was better than Kill. The next fifty or sixty conference games are going to give us the answer...

I enjoyed the Mason years and so far I am enjoying the Kill years. Good luck to Kill...and thank you to Mason! My Golden Gopher Football Program IS a better Program than it had been because of these two good coaches!
 

PartoPitinosPosse said:
I think the 2 biggest differences between Mason and Kill are in game coaching skill/ability and recruiting.

Mason recruited some stars, and he had one year here, and one year there where everything seemed to kind of come together, 99 and 03, but what that is basically evidence of, is poor recruiting basically. Sustained success in football requires a team with depth. Too many times I've had to express the same thing as other Gopher fans, "oh, we lost one of our key players, our #1 WR, or our best DB or yada yada yada", but all teams suffer injuries, but not all teams suck like we do because of those injuries. This is partly because they had depth. A rare example from our own program would be at RB, Kirkwood went down early and his replacement did fine until he went down and then Cobb moved up and did great.

Mason never seemed to develop any significant amount of depth on his rosters. His teams were too susceptible to injury.

So far, and granted we are only 3 years in, but so far it seems like Kill is already bringing in the right personnel and developing some depth. If I am right about this, this will be what will separate him from the Mason's of the world. Instead of having 2 good seasons that resulted in decent but still not major bowls, Kill will get to those kinds of bowl games every year, and when he has his 2 good seasons, they could be Rose Bowl seasons. And once you start getting to decent bowl games every year, and to a Rose Bowl just once, recruiting will really start to pick up.


And this is also where the other factor that so far seems to separate Kill and Mason comes in. Mason found himself in several situations where he had games won, or was in a position to win games, but in the end, he lost those close games, leaving us to talk about how many close calls we had and what could have been, or how on earth could he have lost that game(Michigan, NCSU & TT games).

So far Kill has shown that he makes good adjustments at halftime, and even in many of the games they lost, they outscored the other team in the 2nd half, and I do not know of a single game where we led at halftime, that we didn't go on to win. Now Mason didn't have any of those big embarrassing losses in his first 3 years, so its almost not fair to compare them in this way at this point, but I have a strong feeling that in another 5-6 years, we'll be able to look back and see that my suspicions were right on in this regard. There is no way on earth that I believe Jerry Kill will give up a 20+ pt lead in a game like Mason did several times.



Long term that will make a huge difference.
Click to expand...

Umm. . .did you see the Indiana game this year?
 







Thank you Dr. Don for making clear what I thought was obvious, but yeah, we won that game. Had Mason pulled out Ws in those games, no one would have criticized him really.
 



PartoPitinosPosse said:
Thank you Dr. Don for making clear what I thought was obvious, but yeah, we won that game. Had Mason pulled out Ws in those games, no one would have criticized him really.
Click to expand...

Hate to bring it up, but Kill is capable of blowing late leads partopitinosposse. Do you recall last years game in Houston against Texas Tech?

Some of you people need to realize that sometimes football games go that way. I am very sorry partopitinosposse...but Kill is only in his third season. There are going to be all kinds of Conference Teams coming at him each year that he coaches and some of those coaches and teams will have the fire power to come from behind and score a LOT of points in a hurry. It's just the nature of the game in the year 2013 and beyond. Technically, he also lost a lead against NDSU a few years ago and they went on to beat my Gophers pretty convincingly. Am I criticizing Kill for that? Nope. You won't hear that from me. Sometimes leads get away. Sometimes players don't execute very well. Sometimes the mission gets blown. It happened to Mason. It has happened to Kill. It can happen...does happen...and...will happen again in the future.

Some of you fans aren't very sophisticated about the way that college football goes sometimes. I will promise you...I will guarantee you that Kill will lose a few he really shouldn't lose. And, I think Kill is a really good coach! In college football, sometimes NO lead is a SAFE lead.

And if some of you are pretending Kill is "different" in that regard, you are only fooling yourselves. The man is NOT "superman..." He's just a damn good coach who puts his pants on one leg at a time just the same way other damn good college coaches do.

Some of you people are really hard to believe.

I guess I'm not surprised though.

Note to Coach Kill: some of the fans seem to believe that you NEVER lose games once you gain the lead. I'm not being critical, but what happened last year against Texas Tech so very late in that game? And what happened a few years ago against NDSU? Some of these fans are really something else, aren't they Coach Kill?
 

imthewalrus said:
Hate to bring it up, but Kill is capable of blowing late leads partopitinosposse. Do you recall last years game in Houston against Texas Tech?

Some of you people need to realize that sometimes football games go that way. I am very sorry partopitinosposse...but Kill is only in his third season. There are going to be all kinds of Conference Teams coming at him each year that he coaches and some of those coaches and teams will have the fire power to come from behind and score a LOT of points in a hurry. It's just the nature of the game in the year 2013 and beyond. Technically, he also lost a lead against NDSU a few years ago and they went on to beat my Gophers pretty convincingly. Am I criticizing Kill for that? Nope. You won't hear that from me. Sometimes leads get away. Sometimes players don't execute very well. Sometimes the mission gets blown. It happened to Mason. It has happened to Kill. It can happen...does happen...and...will happen again in the future.

Some of you fans aren't very sophisticated about the way that college football goes sometimes. I will promise you...I will guarantee you that Kill will lose a few he really shouldn't lose. And, I think Kill is a really good coach! In college football, sometimes NO lead is a SAFE lead.

And if some of you are pretending Kill is "different" in that regard, you are only fooling yourselves. The man is NOT "superman..." He's just a damn good coach who puts his pants on one leg at a time just the same way other damn good college coaches do.

Some of you people are really hard to believe.

I guess I'm not surprised though.

Note to Coach Kill: some of the fans seem to believe that you NEVER lose games once you gain the lead. I'm not being critical, but what happened last year against Texas Tech so very late in that game? And what happened a few years ago against NDSU? Some of these fans are really something else, aren't they Coach Kill?
Click to expand...



Nice condescending attitude. What a desperate attempt to make an argument out of nothing.

First of all, I never even came close to saying that Kill hasn't or couldn't give up ANY lead, held at ANY time in ANY game.


And I didn't make any of my comments with an air of certainty around them as I was asking the question, as my work schedule keeps me very busy in the fall and I can't even watch most of the Gopher games, so I can't always remember one way or another. And just because I said I thought he hadn't lost a game that he had the lead at halftime doesn't mean I think he'll never lose a game he has a half time lead in. It sucks, but until I can afford to get a lower paying job its what I have to do. But the thing is you are wrong, at least in the context of what I we were talking about. Minnesota did NOT hold a lead vs NDSU or TT at halftime. We scored first against NDSU, whoopdeedoo. That was the only time in that game we had a lead. Hardly means anything. Inferior teams score first all of the time. That game has no relevance whatsoever to this conversation. Except in another way of looking at coaches is how they do vs opponents in the 2nd half, and we outscored NDSU in the 2nd half, as Kill did many times in games we lost. Which is ADDITIONAL evidence that can be pointed to or considered when you look at the fact he hasn't given up a game where he had a lead at halftime. it just seems that Kill makes good adjustments at halftime and has his team outplay superior opponents in the 2nd half a lot, and has his team outplay or at least maintain the lead against inferior opponents.

The TT game is also different, in that we were behind at halftime, made a comeback to tie the game up and gain a late game lead against a superior opponent and Kill put us in a position to win the game in the end, and that is all he can do as a coach, really. He could have avoided sending in any passing plays and then we would have simply lost the game in OT instead. Personally I am pleased that he acted like a mans man and went for the win.


I am fine with you offering up a contrasting opinion, but why don't you drop the consdescending and insulting comments and attitude? Or not, its your cchoice and your right to be a loser if you so choose.
 

Kill already has more "home" wins that mattered than Mason. For all of so called Mason "big" wins not one was at home. Mason never gave the home fans a chance to cheer. Kill gave more life last year to Gopher season ticket holders than Mason ever did.
 

Thought it was a pretty balanced article that acknowledged our progress and pointed out the challenge ahead.

Chuckled a bit at DiNardo's comments. I had this image of Mason standing behind him with a hammer and a menacing look on his face. I generally like DiNardo and ncgo4 said, DiNardo has been pretty complimentary of the Gophers this year (of course, Jerry is pretty much the "good cop" over the BTN). I think where Kill will do better than Mason is that he appears to build for the long haul so that you're never really re-building, but instead re-loading. I always thought Mason's most successful teams were teams in which he started playing guys as sophomores and never taking them out of games unless they got injured. Problem with that approach is those guys graduate and if you have too many key players in the same class, you're likely to suffer a performance trough of sorts. It's only Kill's third year and a lot of his patterns during the first three years were dictated out of necessity, but he looks like a guy who gets a lot of guys a lot of experience so that they are ready to step in when it's their turn to start.

I think the other difference comes in "how" the Gophers won this year and that's important. The biggest difference I've noticed so far in the Kill era is that his teams are extremely physical. I've said it before and I stand by it. Kill's teams are the most physically punishing squads we've had since Holtz left. Same approach. You just keep hitting and at the end of the action, the other team knows they've been in a game. I was never much of a football player, but that's what always makes an impression. I think that is why Ferentz has had the fairly consistent record of success in Iowa.

The next step will be on the recruiting side of the equation. If we raise the athleticism at the skilled positions, the sky is the limit.
 

So Kill's approach is just the opposite of Mason's? Kill might be a serious threat to outlast Mason's tenure of ten years IF he had a better offense, "doncha think, killjoy?" What the heck did that dude from that site that you are always trying to get people to "click on" say would happen against Syracuse according to all the numbers? Did he have the outcome of the game all figured out? Or was it just another fringe bowl piece of b.s. that you were plugging?
 

Pioneer80 said:
Kill already has more "home" wins that mattered than Mason. For all of so called Mason "big" wins not one was at home. Mason never gave the home fans a chance to cheer. Kill gave more life last year to Gopher season ticket holders than Mason ever did.
Click to expand...

Kill had a couple "nice wins" for the home folks over Nebraska and PSU...but has he even once beaten wisky at home? At least Mason got that done a few times. I think you are a bit confused here pioneer80. If you really want to make a statement like that, I would be more than happy to do a little research on Erick T's Gopher History page. There were some damn fine players who played for Mason and won some very nice games at home and on the road when they were on my Golden Gopher Football Team as players.

Without the wins Mason managed to beg, borrow and steal at home and on the road, there would be NO TCF BANK STADIUM for Coach Kill and his staff to coach in on Game Day Saturday...

You can hate on Mason all you want, BUT until Kill surpasses the numbers of Conference wins Mason achieved, you can't claim that Kill is better than Mason was...or Cal Stoll was...or Murray was or Bernie was...

Kill needs to take good care of himself to insure that he will stick around for ten year tenure! AND: he needs to win a bunch of conference games during the next seven seasons to stay in the race against Mason...Personally, I hope Kill shatters Mason's Big Ten wins. That would mean that my next 7 years of attending Gopher Football games would be very enjoyable.
 

Pioneer80 said:
Kill already has more "home" wins that mattered than Mason. For all of so called Mason "big" wins not one was at home. Mason never gave the home fans a chance to cheer. Kill gave more life last year to Gopher season ticket holders than Mason ever did.
Click to expand...

2005 vs Wisconsin was not a big win that mattered?
 



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