I agree.
Hey,
so did Brewster!
What does Kill's 2-12 record against teams with a winning record say about his ability to coach?
There is so much crazy talk going on here you would think we hired Nick Saban or Mack Brown. Every one is assuming that because Kill was able to win more games in the third year at NIU, primarily using the last guy's players, than were won the year before he came - which was by all accounts an off year similar to what the Vikes are having this year - that somehow Kill's body of work is so tremendous that recruits and opposing coaches are going to fall into line and we are moving to the top of the Big Ten, if not next year, at least by the year after. This is exactly the same unrealistic pile of goo we lived through when Brewster was hired.
Folks, we hired a bargain basement coach. He has no big time experience. As Plinnius and others point out, his record against successful programs is not great. Big time recruits outside of a 200 mile circle of Dekalb probably do not know him and certainly will not be eager to send in their recruiting tape because he is not a glamour coach and the program is fighting Indiana for the bragging rights to say that we are not the worst program in the Big Ten. Unlike so many of you, I fail to see that his comments at his press conference or any of the softball interviews he has given do anything to make me think he is ready to conquer the Big Ten. His performance wasn't awful, but it wasn't stirring and seemed just what you would expect from a MAC coach. He may or may not succeed. No one wishes him to fail. I would be very pleased to see him take us further up the Big Ten pecking order. But, I do not expect that to happen based on the reality of the situation.
To answer the assertion made at the outset of the thread, recruiting is not recruiting. You need someone as the face of your program who can command the respect of those elite (or at least better) athletes we need to make the program competitive. That's why Notre Dame stole Holz from us, that's why Alabama paid for Saban, that's why Stanford has risen to its current prominence. They all went out and found that leader that could be built around. We needed a more commanding personality to turn our culture around. Bruininks said so and said he would spend the money to get one. Then, unfortunately, he left Maturi in charge. Golden, Edsall, Hoke etc. would have provided a better shot, albeit not guaranteed, to break out of our recruiting woes and set us on a winning track. We have gone a different route and this post is not meant to rehash the bothched coaching search.
Currently the common wisdom here appears to be that all we have to do is win and we will get plenty of recruits and the program will take a giant leap forward. This makes the assumption that because Coach Kill is on the scene, we will win. Some point to the fact that Coach Kill stresses hard work and discipline, like no other Big Ten coach ever heard of these virtues. Others claim that he has some sort of winning record that would rival Bobby Bowden and JoePa, ignoring the fact that most of his wins came in the Missouri Valley Football Conference or lesser conferences. I am not saying he is an awful coach or a bad guy. The opposite may well be true, but lets be a little realistic. The odds are not good that he will do any better than his predecessor. In my view, it would be more interesting and informative if we could discuss these issues with a more realistic perspective.
The next stop on the realism highway is to see how many of the recruits, if any, who have commited to Minnesota change their mind instead of assuming that Coach Kill will be able to automatically keep them by talking to them about winning. At the same time it will be informative to find out how many new skilled athletes he will be able to add to the mix. But what we need is the hard data on what is happening, not optimistic blather. When we have this data, we will be in a better position to assess how the Kill era is working out.
