The Gophers face a team on Saturday that's done a bizarre about-face this season, opening the season with six straight wins before slumping their way to the finish with five straight losses. What Illinois had hoped would be a historic year has turned into a nightmare for coach Ron Zook.
Jerry Kill has sensed a similar turnaround for his team, though the evidence isn't nearly as dramatic in the record. But the past month has been a lot different than the first two, he said at his weekly press conference on Tuesday.
"The second half [against] Nebraska on, it's been a different group of kids," Kill said. "We've gotten a little big tougher. Our kids have, over the last four or five weeks, kind of figured out how you need to practice and what you need to do. I've enjoyed them. I wish that would have happened back during the spring, but it just didn't."
That the Gophers have only won one game in that time is what particularly impresses the coach. "Several guys have dropped by to see practice, [like] scouts, they go, 'Hey, Coach, you'd never know you won just two games. Boy, those kids are working hard for you,' " Kill said. "And they have."
Mistakes are still costing them games -- special-teams letdowns were particularly harmful at Northwestern -- but Kill said he has seen tangible improvement over the last month.
"We're taking baby steps. Probably, if I coached a little bit better, [if] I had been a little better coach, maybe we'd have had a few more wins to show for it," he said. "But I do think we're making progress. If I didn't, I'd tell you, but I think we are."