This blog has tried to point out during the bad times for Wisconsin sports teams that it used to be far, far worse than today.
Wisconsin’s bad past (1988: a combined 5–22 record for the Badger and Packer football teams, those last two words applied loosely) appears to now be Minnesota’s present. The Vikings are 0–2, and the Gophers … all I need do is pass on the words of a former boss, a graduate of the U of M:
Lou Holtz clearly enunciated his words and his speech pattern was perfect when he when he stood up in Little Rock and declared, “I’m going to be the head coach at Minnesota.” It’s a tough job, some say cursed, that sucks the life out of mortal men. All the way back to Warmath, every UM head coach is addled, dead or irrelevant. This is what happens when you lose to Washington and the UPI votes you national champions. It was a deal with the devil that has haunted the program since. It’s UM’s curse of the Bambino. Having a coach named Kill?….. just too easy for spirits.Norwood needs to slaughter a goat at midfield, throw a co-ed into a volcano (a sinkhole would do) or bite off live chicken heads in Dinkytown. Then go find a new coach. Who? It has to be the guy who played the voodoo witch doctor in the James Bond movies. It’s our only hope. Even Tony Dungy couldn’t pull us out of the flushing swirl that’s leading to exoneration from the Big 10, reluctant acceptance into the football subdivision and a schedule of home & away series with the likes of UW-Platteville, Parkside, DeVry, Lawrence and a Madden challenge with the University of Phoenix. Hell, even NDSU beat – no, whupped, throttled, schooled, put foot up our ass, embarrassed us… Oh well, we’re gonna kick some ass in the MN state championship playoffs this year. If we can get past South St Paul in the quarterfinals I think we can win it all, of course that’s if the coach is available to coach.
Norwood, in the name of all that is holy, man up, build the practice facility and hire a coach who can build a solid program from next to nothing. John Koronkieweicz would be a great choice, but UM can’t afford him and he’s too good a man to be sacrificed like that.
(Koronkiewicz is the long-time coach at Waupaca High School, by the way.)
The glory days of Wisconsin football have been in the past 20 years — six Rose Bowl appearances and three Rose Bowl wins in the past two decades. Before that, Wisconsin had three Rose Bowl berths — after the 1952, 1959 and 1962 seasons — all of which ended in losses.
The glory days of Minnesota football have been … uh … well, they went 34–0–1 between ’03 and ’05. That’s 1903 to 1905. The Gophers won three national championships between 1934 and 1936, and two more in 1940 and 1941. They also won the national championship in 1960 (as voted upon after the regular season). They had back-to-back Rose Bowls in 1961 (losing to Washington) and 1962 (beating UCLA), and last won (one-third of) the Big Ten title in 1967.
Henry L. Williams, of the 35-games-without-a-loss streak, Bernie Bierman, of the five national championships, and Murray Warmath, who coached from 1954 to 1971, are the three most successful Gopher football coaches. After those three is Glen Mason, who went 64–57 in 10 seasons. Mason’s last game was the 2006 Insight Bowl, in which Minnesota led Texas Tech 38–7 in the third quarter only to lose 44–41 in overtime. The ignominy of the biggest collapse in Division I football postseason history got Mason fired.
That may not have been the best decision UM made, given what followed Mason, namely Tim Brewster, who went 15–30 in four seasons. Kill, who was very successful at Northern Illinois, is 15–16 going into Saturday. After Warmath were Cal Stoll (39–39 in seven seasons), Joe Salem (19–35–1 in five seasons), Holtz (10–12 before running to Notre Dame), John Gutekunst (29–36–2 in six seasons) and Jim Wacker (16–39 in five seasons).
Wacker has an indirect tie to Wisconsin. While Gutekunst coached the Gophers to mediocrity, Don Mor(t)on coached the Badgers to six wins — one, over Minnesota, in 1988 — in three seasons. Mor(t)on was a protege of Wacker, who at the time was running the veer offense. Mor(t)on ran the veer at North Dakota State, then Tulsa, then Wisconsin, if that’s what you want to call his three-year reign of (t)error in Madison. Minnesota hired Wacker in 1992, but by then Wacker had abandoned the veer for the pass-wacky run-and-shoot offense, which worked slightly better than Mor(t)on’s veer. Lesson: Never, ever, ever, ever, ever hire a system coach. Any coach who has gotten where he is on his system can’t coach anything but his system, and then where are you when his system craters? (See Wisconsin, 1988 and 1989.)
There is a second, more direct, tie to Wisconsin. That is Joel Maturi, formerly an assistant athletic director at Wisconsin (largely because he was a well-known football coach and athletic director at Edgewood High School) and, after running the University of Denver’s athletic department, Minnesota’s athletic director. Maturi was replaced by Norwood Teague.
What prompted my ex-boss’ screed was an unfortunate event Saturday — the epileptic seizure suffered by Gophers coach Jerry Kill during the game, which prompted Minneapolis Star Tribune sportswriter Jim Souhan to write:
Jerry Kill suffered another seizure on another game day, and this time his boss chose to pretend nothing was wrong.
How can a school continue to employ a football coach who has had four seizures during or after the 16 home games he has coached at the school, along with an unknown number of seizures away from the public eye?
How can the athletic director in charge of that coach avoid speaking publicly about such a public and newsworthy event?
Kill suffers a seizure on game day as the coach of the Gophers at TCF Bank Stadium exactly as often as he wins a Big Ten game. He’s 4-for-16 in both categories.
His latest epileptic seizure, suffered on Saturday, evokes sympathy for him and his family. He appears to be a good man earnestly trying to elevate a woeful program while searching for ways to manage his disease.
Even those who admire him most can’t believe that he should keep coaching major college football after his latest episode. Either the stress of the job is further damaging his health, or his health was in such disrepair that he shouldn’t have been hired to coach in the Big Ten in the first place.
The face of your program can’t belong to someone who may be rushed to the hospital at any moment of any game, or practice, or news conference. No one who buys a ticket to TCF Bank Stadium should be rewarded with the sight of a middle-aged man writhing on the ground. This is not how you compete for sought-after players and entertainment dollars.
Kill’s case is sad. He did good work his entire life to reach a position that his system can no longer handle.
The irony here is that Souhan wrote this after a Gopher win, 29–12 over Western Illinois. The bigger irony is that the Gophers are 3–0, although Nevada–Las Vegas, New Mexico State and Western Illinois remind no one of Ohio State or, for that matter, Wisconsin.
Souhan then had to respond to those who responded to his column:
-Yes, I understand that the University of Minnesota can’t and shouldn’t fire Jerry Kill because he has epileptic seizures. I do believe the administration should ask him to step aside, and believe Kill should do so.
-No, I don’t believe it’s OK for everyone to accept that Kill will not be able to coach frequently because of his seizures and that his assistants can handle his duties. The U didn’t hire Kill’s assistants for more than a million dollars a year to handle his duties. They hired Jerry Kill with the assumption that he could handle the job.
-Yes, I am sympathetic to Kill. I expressed that in my column. But his is not the average job. He can’t pretend to be the same as someone who works 9-5 in a cubicle. He is in the entertainment industry. He is the face of a program and by extension a University.
-No, I don’t think I’m being cruel, I think many of you are being cruel. Kill has had four seizures on game days in 16 home games at Minnesota. The stress of the job seems to have a negative effect on him. You shouldn’t want him to put himself in that position for your entertainment.
-No, my criticism of Kill has nothing to do with his coaching. I think he’s a solid coach who has a chance to succeed here. But he’s not doing the program or himself or his family any favors by risking his health.
Mark the Gopher added:
It’s not so much the record as it is the decency to prevent the man from hurting himself. Teague risks being thrown in with the guy who picks a drunk off the bus stop bench and drops him off at the liquor store. Kill won’t quit until… (too easy, too gruesome, too real, reboot, reboot). Teague has to make him stop before something really serious happens. I don’t know anything about seizures other than they’re not normal, not good for you and they’re a sign of a serious health issue. Can Kill continue without damaging his health? Seems unlikely, but let’s say maybe. The problem then is what’s the story of the game or the season? …”Gophers lose but Kill seizure free!”, “O-Line shaken by Badger D; Kill by Epilepsy”; that’s just wrong on so many levels. If viewership and ticket sales go up because NASCAR’s season is over and the people who watch races to see a horrific wreck are checking in to… Ah, this is just getting worse and worse.
I’ve suggested that the next Gopher coach will be former Badger coach Bret Bielema, after Arkansas discovers he really can’t coach and, upset with Arkansas’ inability to compete with Texas and Alabama to its east and west, fires him. Mark doesn’t want to wait four more years.
I don’t believe I have ever known anyone with epilepsy, so I can’t make a medical comment. Certainly having four seizures during games looks bad, but is it bad for his health? I don’t know. The more cold-blooded issue is that the Gophers are drawing less than 50,000 people per game (their best attended home games are usually Wisconsin, for the Paul Bunyan Axe, or Iowa, for the Floyd of Rosedale cast pig) into their new outdoor stadium, and Kill may or may not be making the program a contender. (Wisconsin has won nine in a row over Minnesota.)
The one thing Minnesota had better have in mind is an on-staff successor if Kill has to quit. Wisconsin found that out the hard way after Dave McClain died and Jim Hilles was quickly found to not be the answer. (Then again, Don Mor(t)on was the answer to the wrong question.) Barry Alvarez had an answer in Bielema, though I doubt he knew about Bielema’s less publicly presentable side.
Wisconsin’s experience after Mor(t)on demonstrates what you have to do to develop a program from the depths. (And UW football was clearly in the depths when Alvarez came to town.) The administration must make a commitment to the program, in terms of facilities (and practice facilities are at least as important as a stadium, because players spend more time at practice than in games) and other areas that require money. You have to find a coach who can recruit on blue sky — we’re not good now, but we will be, so why not come in on the ground floor — and a coach who can win in the rugged Big Ten, by fundamentals, not flashy scheme. (The Big Ten is not the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-Astroturf-flakes it used to be, but if you can’t play defense, you won’t last long.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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