On Saturday at 4 a.m., ESPN's national recruiting director Tom Luginbill was up studying videotape of recent Gophers commit Isaiah Gentry, a wide receiver from Cincinnati's Moeller High School.
Luginbill tweeted about what he was doing, and this led to a quick exchange with a follower who has an Auburn logo for an avatar:
Two days later, ESPN held a media conference call with Luginbill, and I asked him to explain what inspired his tweet.
I used part of that answer in this story analyzing the class the Gophers are expected to unveil on National Signing Day. Here's a longer version of Luginbill's answer:
"Coaching can be defined in a lot of ways, but when you take a football team like the one [Kill] had this fall. You go through the off-the-field situation you had with the seizures and the epilepsy, you win eight-plus games with a roster -- and I don't mean this to sound negative -- but that roster had no business winning eight games, and I think that's a sign of coaching.
"In many ways, he's like a Jim Grobe at Wake [Forest], when he had a great run there. There are guys out there that I don't think get the credit they deserve, and [Kill's] certainly one of them.
"And I think he's in the process right now of enhancing the roster with more speed, more athleticism. It's just not something you do overnight by waving a magic wand, it's a process.
"All I know is, if you don't believe in his process, then you haven't been paying attention to his history because all he's done is won."
