Tim Brewster looked like a guy you would cast in a movie as a football coach, but he never had much success on the field. Jerry Kill doesn't look the part, Hollywood-style, at all -- so Gopher fans can hope that the results are equally different.
in looking for information about Minnesota's new football coach, I called Jeff Potrykus of the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal, the Wisconsin Badgers' beat writer who wrote this profile of Kill before Northern Illinois visited Madison last year. Potrykus said he had spent some time with Kill in DeKalb for the story, and he was definitely impressed.
"He's not going to walk into a room and leave you with the impression that he's selling you medicine, real estate or a used car," Potrykus said. "He's going to give you the impression that his No. 1 goal is to win football games."
He's done it at every stop of his career, stretching back for nearly two decades.
But he's not Mike Leach, Dan Mullen or Brady Hoke, and that's not going to play well with Gopher fans who were clearly expecting someone with more notoriety than a MAC coach.
"I'm sure Minnesota fans, at least some, will be looking at this hire and saying, 'Oh my God, no,' " Potrykus said. "But if you give this guy a chance, he will put a respectable product on the field. If his teams resemble his teams from the past, like at NIU and Southern Illinois, they will be tough mentally and physically, they will play hard-nosed, and they will fight for four quarters."
OK, but that's only half the job at the Big Ten level. The real competition comes in the living rooms of potential recruits, who want to be wowed by a school. Can Kill recruit well enough?
"That's the one thing we don't know. But if kids sit down and talk to him, I think he'll be fine," Potrykus said. Kill has brought his longtime staff with him to every stop; eight different assistant coaches at NIU had worked with Kill before they arrived in DeKalb, and that sort of stability can appeal to recruits.
And there's another trait about Kill's Huskies that should hearten Gopher fans even more, Potrykus said.
"That staff, they can coach guys up," he said. "Even at first, if they don't get all the four-star guys Brewster talked about getting, they'll coach up the guys they have and you'll see improvement on the field. That makes an impression on recruits. That could be the catalyst to getting kids, especially instate kids. And I think fans will come around."
If you want to read even more about Kill, here's another story, from last week's Chicago Tribune. And of course, check out all our coverage at startribune.com.