Jerry Kill's biggest rebuilding job--by far.

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LonelyIowaGopher

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I've read the few articles that have made it to print about Jerry Kill's co-ordinators at both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Although they've been very good and tremendously encouraging pieces, I must say the the response from readers has been alarming--as in, nonexistent.
Just thirty readers responded to the St. Paul Pioneer Press article and as of this morning about ten readers had commented on each of the two Minneapolis Star Tribune piecess. About a third of the responses are either very cynical and/or obviously written by fans of other Big 10 teams--mostly Iowa and Wisconsin.
Jerry Kill's biggest rebuilding job will be with the Minnesota Gopher fan base. Des Moines is Iowa's largest city (by far) but only about the size of St. Paul proper. The Minneapolis Tribune has a readership that is as high as any paper of its size in the country. This is the best Gopher fans can do in responding to stories about their new football coach and his staff? The Des Moines Register alone would have had responses from readers that would have been ten times as large about a similar situation at either Iowa or Iowa State. Iowans don't have much else to follow than college sports but the lack of even interest in the Minnesota Gopher football program is disheartening.
 

There are example upon examples of this lack of interest, and thread upon thread dedicated to it. The bottom line is fans come with success, and that's true in Iowa City and Madison just as it is in St. Paul and Minneapolis.
 

RedPoo said:
There are example upon examples of this lack of interest, and thread upon thread dedicated to it. The bottom line is fans come with success, and that's true in Iowa City and Madison just as it is in St. Paul and Minneapolis.
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Very true, but I'm actually impressed by the level of passion the fans have considering program history.
 

For those of us who are true fans and true supporters of the program, I find this to be no big deal. Some day, rather soon, a ticket to a Gopher football game will be hard to come by.

A message to give the unwashed unbelievers: "We don't need you." I will take a 20-30 year old drunken tailgater over a 50 year old cynic any day. That's the new Gopher fan. Eventually, the drinking tails off (a little) and they bring their kids.

Even as bad as things were last year, there were more fans at the games than at the Metrodome. I just keep snapping up season tickets and continue to preach the Gopher Gospel. You do the same and don't worry about the media and how things are in Iowa City. We support Gopher football and will continue to do so whether Kill succeeds or not (and I truly believe he will).

I went to games with my grandparents and parents. We take our kids to almost every game (ages 8-10-12-23-26). They will pass the torch down.

Go Gophers!
 

College sports is the only gig in Iowa so there is nothing else really out there to compete for attention to their college programs. If you look at the Southeastern Conference where the fanbase is huge for each program it is due in large part to a lack of professional sports in most areas.

The other factor already talked about is a lack of winning on a consistent basis.
 


GeorgiaGopher said:
College sports is the only gig in Iowa so there is nothing else really out there to compete for attention to their college programs. If you look at the Southeastern Conference where the fanbase is huge for each program it is due in large part to a lack of professional sports in most areas.

The other factor already talked about is a lack of winning on a consistent basis.
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Bingo! People in Minnesota have better things to do than comment on newspaper stories. Not the case in Iowa.
 

In the 70's the U suffered under an administration that was both mediocre in quality and hostile to athletics. At the same time a group within the Board of Regents was determined to dumb down the U, so that any Minnesota high school graduate could attend, regardless of merit. For years thereafter, attending the U lost its luster, and attendance at football games reflected that.

Until recently, there were also serious structural problems. The quarter system began in late September, so the student body wasn't even on campus for the first 4 games of the season. And even if the students were there, the team wasn't - it was off campus at the Metrodome.

Over the last several years there have been steps in the right direction. But we still have a long way to go to get back to where we were in 1960.
 

Schlic Daddy said:
Bingo! People in Minnesota have better things to do than comment on newspaper stories. Not the case in Iowa.
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Not true, if it were a Viking story their would be over 300 comments and 1000 reads.
 

MaxyJR1 said:
Not true, if it were a Viking story their would be over 300 comments and 1000 reads.
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Bingo.

Even in a last place year like this. As previously documented the winning percentage of the Vikings and Gophers since the Mason era is close to even. People continue to think it's all about the number of wins but it's simply not true.

The way the NFL is structured with 40% of the teams each year making the playoffs and giving fans something to be excited about has a lot to do with it. A 9-7 Vikings team is going to keep interest all year long, while a 7-5 Gopher squad will be an afterthought at best once they lose two BT games.
 



If Iowa city or Madison had an NFL team you would see the same affect. Remember, the Gophers are the only Big Ten football program with a NFL team in the same city.

However, they also have the highest population of any Big Ten city, so once Jerry Kill turns this around, you will see sold out crowds at the bank, but to the casual football fan, the Vikings will always have a more broad appeal in this city, and the same would be true if other Big Ten cities had NFL teams.
 

I don't even think it is a rebuilding thing because if he rebuilds the program, if Kill rebuilds the team, the media will come around.
 

doncorleone said:
If Iowa city or Madison had an NFL team you would see the same affect. Remember, the Gophers are the only Big Ten football program with a NFL team in the same city.

However, they also have the highest population of any Big Ten city, so once Jerry Kill turns this around, you will see sold out crowds at the bank, but to the casual football fan, the Vikings will always have a more broad appeal in this city, and the same would be true if other Big Ten cities had NFL teams.
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There are not many BCS schools who have a NFL team in their backyard.
 

Surprised and pleased...

I am very surprised and pleased with the responses to my original comment, which I made with some fear and trepidation. This board is obviously filled with members who could not be more committed to the success of the Gopher football program.
I am so excited about the upcoming Jerry Kill era in Minnesota that it's hard for me to contain my enthusiasm. I just wish I lived in Minnesota to share it with every sports fan I might come to know there.
Having seen what Hayden Fry, Bill Snyder and Barry Alvarez did to rebuild the Iowa, Kansas State and Wisconsin programs, I just know Minnesota fans are in for a treat with Kill and his staff. Also, the fact that Minnesota has its beautiful new stadium is great for the future.
The best value in sports tickets in Minnesota will be--by far--any ticket to a future Minnesota football game. Season tickets will be an even better value. There are probably no bad seats in the place, it's located right on campus and most games will be played in beautiful weather OUTDOORS.
Even if Kill never wins a Big Ten championship, his teams should be lots of fun to watch. Kill and his staff will never stop working and they appear to have few if any ego problems. This is the kind of thing people can really get behind and enjoy.
Why not support both the Vikings and Gopher football. The Green Bay Packers don't play in Madison. But does anyone seriously believe the Packers aren't as important to Badgers fans as the Vikings are to Gopher fans? Also, I think Northwestern is in the Big 10 and the last time I looked Chicago had an NFL team.
Finally, I wanted to make a comment on an unrelated topic. It has to do with the Nebraska football program. The Nebraska teams that Minnesota will be playing starting this year are not the Nebraska teams of the 1960s through the 1990s. Tom Osborne won 250 football games in 25 years in what was, most of the time, one of the toughest football conferences in the country. No Nebraska coach since Osborne--including Bo Pellini--have come close to matching Osborne's record. Pellini is an extremely arrogant hot head. He will struggle in the Big 10 and Nebraska fans won't tolerate that for long. Job security at Nebraska isn't what it used to be.
 



MaxyJR1 said:
Not true, if it were a Viking story their would be over 300 comments and 1000 reads.
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I think it is true. Minnesota Sports fans have so many choices, that if the program isn't winning the interest dies for that team. Look at the Wolves since KG left. If they get one more star to go with Love and Beasley, tickets again will be harder to come by, now you can go for $10.00 . Look at Twins Fest. It's sold out for three days this weekend. People stood in line for hours to get a baseball signed. Gophers Hockey and the Wild which sells out every game. Way too much to do to be focused on Gophers football in Late January. Plus, you can't compare the NFL with any college program in the same town. Compare local fan interest in Pitt compared to the Steelers, Falcons to GA Tech. Bears to NW and on and on and on. Iowa wrestling is probably the most popular attraction in that state right now. Why not waste time responding to a newspaper article while in Ames or Iowa City.
 

Great call on Northwestern, but i think you'll agree that fan interest in the wildcats pales in comparison to that of the Bears.

Also, fans in Madison are rabid Packer fans, but there wasn't much fan interest in the Badgers until they started winning. And now that they are, and have been for some time, fan interest is very high, but if the Packers and Badgers were in the same city, fan interest would be high for both because they both Win.

Again, when (not if) the gophers start winning, they will have no problem with fan interest and involvement, but like Madison has shown us, the winning has to come first.
 

It was not just the 70's, even if they were not hostile to athletics, the administrations before Bruininks did nothing to help football turnaround until Bruininks decided to go for the stadium. (I like Joel, but I give Mason a lot more credit than Joel for speaking up on the issue before it became politically acceptable at the U to do it.) I also think Joel is an ineffectual AD for the revenue sports, but that is another subject.
anyway, nobody before Bruininks did anything but tiptoe around the issue, especailly at the legislature. If Bruininks had not done it when it was approved, it probably never would have happened.
 

11:00pm in the off-season and there's 400 people viewing the football forum here. That might say something.
 

Texas-Gopher said:
11:00pm in the off-season and there's 400 people viewing the football forum here. That might say something.
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Yep that all the recruits are taking notice. We will win here! I guarantee it! I am really looking forward to this upcoming fall.
 

corcoran1 said:
It was not just the 70's, even if they were not hostile to athletics, the administrations before Bruininks did nothing to help football turnaround until Bruininks decided to go for the stadium. (I like Joel, but I give Mason a lot more credit than Joel for speaking up on the issue before it became politically acceptable at the U to do it.) I also think Joel is an ineffectual AD for the revenue sports, but that is another subject.
anyway, nobody before Bruininks did anything but tiptoe around the issue, especailly at the legislature. If Bruininks had not done it when it was approved, it probably never would have happened.
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To his credit, Mark Yudof (President of the U before Bob Bruininks) did a LOT of groundwork in the late 90s to get rid of the "commuter school" mantra the U had for forty years. Making staying in the res halls attractive again, painting the Washington Avenue Bridge maroon and gold instead of battleship gray, Beautiful U Day, etc. Get more students living around campus, and the prospect of going to the Dump for a football game becomes less and less attractive. You could probably credit him with doing the long-range groundwork for getting out of the Dump.

Nils Hasselmo had the Final Four (and the resulting surge in fan interest) fall into his lap.
 

josh087 said:
Bingo.

Even in a last place year like this. As previously documented the winning percentage of the Vikings and Gophers since the Mason era is close to even. People continue to think it's all about the number of wins but it's simply not true.

The way the NFL is structured with 40% of the teams each year making the playoffs and giving fans something to be excited about has a lot to do with it. A 9-7 Vikings team is going to keep interest all year long, while a 7-5 Gopher squad will be an afterthought at best once they lose two BT games.
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Except a 7-5 Gopher squad is not the same as a 9-7 Vikings squad. The Vikings don't play 4 (in the Mason era) or 3 (in the Brewster era) games against teams from lesser conferences. There's no Louisiana Monroe or Ball State on the Vikings schedule. If the Gophers were 2 games above .500 in the Big Ten, I think there would be more interest.
 

EG#9 said:
Except a 7-5 Gopher squad is not the same as a 9-7 Vikings squad. The Vikings don't play 4 (in the Mason era) or 3 (in the Brewster era) games against teams from lesser conferences. There's no Louisiana Monroe or Ball State on the Vikings schedule. If the Gophers were 2 games above .500 in the Big Ten, I think there would be more interest.
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I totally agree with this.

If the gophers had back to back 5-3 Big Ten seasons, which probably would result in two warm weather, decent bowl games, TCF would be a hard ticket to come by.
 

gopherbadgerman said:
I totally agree with this.

If the gophers had back to back 5-3 Big Ten seasons, which probably would result in two warm weather, decent bowl games, TCF would be a hard ticket to come by.
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I agree if the total record is at least 8-4 or 9-3. I don't know if this is Kill's biggest rebuilding job, but it might be his toughest.
 

gopherbadgerman said:
I totally agree with this.

If the gophers had back to back 5-3 Big Ten seasons, which probably would result in two warm weather, decent bowl games, TCF would be a hard ticket to come by.
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The problem with your argument is that it has been proven wrong in the recent past.

Where was the increased attendance and attention following a 5-3 BT record in 1999?

In 2002, about 30K watched at the dome as a 5-1 Gopher team played Northwestern on homecoming.

The Saturday after the 2003 Michigan game the dome was just as empty as before, and that was a game in which the Gophers were still ranked, had only one BT loss, and controlled its own destiny for the rose bowl.

Then, in 2004, after the Gophers went 5-3 in the BT the year previous, and returning two of the best RBs in the nation on a nationally ranked team to start the year, nothing was different, even after the team started 5-0.

Sure, there haven't been back-to-back 5-3 BT seasons, but given all of these examples I find it extremely hard to believe even that would substancially change anything.

The only thing that has been proven is that as soon as the Gophers lose one game, all the "fans" go away.
 

josh087 said:
The problem with your argument is that it has been proven wrong in the recent past.

Where was the increased attendance and attention following a 5-3 BT record in 1999?

In 2002, about 30K watched at the dome as a 5-1 Gopher team played Northwestern on homecoming.

The Saturday after the 2003 Michigan game the dome was just as empty as before, and that was a game in which the Gophers were still ranked, had only one BT loss, and controlled its own destiny for the rose bowl.

Then, in 2004, after the Gophers went 5-3 in the BT the year previous, and returning two of the best RBs in the nation on a nationally ranked team to start the year, nothing was different, even after the team started 5-0.

Sure, there haven't been back-to-back 5-3 BT seasons, but given all of these examples I find it extremely hard to believe even that would substancially change anything.

The only thing that has been proven is that as soon as the Gophers lose one game, all the "fans" go away.
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TCF Bank Stadium.
 

I'm not concerned. I was pleasantly surprised by reactions to the hire of coach Kill, after the first day. Initially, comments in the paper were extremely negative, but the next day, positive comments began to dominate. A Vikings story doesn't automatically get 300 comments, there's a story on Star Tribune about Peterson's record setting game in the Pro Bowl, that got 35 comments, and a story about Herschel Walker wanting to return to the Vikings, that got 100 posts from people laughing at the idea.

Attendance dropped after the loss to Michigan in 2003, but that wasn't just a loss, that was like calling the Titanic a fender bender. Our last consecutive winning seasons Big Ten seasons were over 40 years ago.
 

LonelyIowaGopher said:
I've read the few articles that have made it to print about Jerry Kill's co-ordinators at both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Although they've been very good and tremendously encouraging pieces, I must say the the response from readers has been alarming--as in, nonexistent.
Just thirty readers responded to the St. Paul Pioneer Press article and as of this morning about ten readers had commented on each of the two Minneapolis Star Tribune piecess. About a third of the responses are either very cynical and/or obviously written by fans of other Big 10 teams--mostly Iowa and Wisconsin.
Jerry Kill's biggest rebuilding job will be with the Minnesota Gopher fan base. Des Moines is Iowa's largest city (by far) but only about the size of St. Paul proper. The Minneapolis Tribune has a readership that is as high as any paper of its size in the country. This is the best Gopher fans can do in responding to stories about their new football coach and his staff? The Des Moines Register alone would have had responses from readers that would have been ten times as large about a similar situation at either Iowa or Iowa State. Iowans don't have much else to follow than college sports but the lack of even interest in the Minnesota Gopher football program is disheartening.
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You can't be serious with this post. We are now going to measure "interest in the program" based on the number of irrational comments left by people on a newspaper website who have nothing better to do? Did you ever stop to consider the how many people read the article, agree/disagree, then have a REAL DISCUSSION with other fans? Did you ever think that perhaps there are many people like me who have much better things to do rather than writing cynical comments? I take it as a nice piece of journalism, providing some background info on the new coaching staff. I actually liked the fact that we got some news, which seemed to lacking in the previous administration. The fact that the Strib is writing about the Gophers at this time of year should be something to celebrate. instead, you make it seem like the world is coming to an end because not enough people posted comments. If this is going to be the new standard, lord help us all.....
 

Agreed. People hardly ever provide "editorial comment" on newspaper websites that are in agreement with the article. It's easier and more of an emotional release to bash. That said, LonelyIG is pretty cynical and negative and writes long, long, long, long posts. I'll give him credit, if I lived in Iowa, I would be the same way. Except in Ames, where I would feel 10% better.
 

highwayman said:
LonelyIG is pretty cynical and negative and writes long, long, long, long posts. I'll give him credit, if I lived in Iowa, I would be the same way. Except in Ames, where I would feel 10% better.
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I concur. His initial posts were promising, when he discussed the parallels between Kill and Fry, and then the similarities shared by Kill and his good friend Gary Patterson. I'm not sure what happened, but since then, he's fallen into the abyss and is lost amidst the sea of negativity and cynicism that permeates this board.
 

dpodoll68 said:
I concur. His initial posts were promising, when he discussed the parallels between Kill and Fry, and then the similarities shared by Kill and his good friend Gary Patterson. I'm not sure what happened, but since then, he's fallen into the abyss and is lost amidst the sea of negativity and cynicism that permeates this board.
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Must be a slow news day or are the dogs hungry?
 


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