Turner Gill

Turner Gill is the first year head football coach at the University of Kansas. He was fourth in voting for the Heisman Trophy while playing at the University of Nebraska. Prior to being the head coach at KU, he was the head coach at the University of Buffalo. That is where the problem starts with this coach. The University of Buffalo is not a top tier school that plays the best programs in the country. The University of Buffalo, under coach Gill, did not even have a winning record. They were invited to one bowl game in Gill's tenure at the school and they lost!

Turner Gill was hired for many reasons by Lew Perkins. The first and most important is that Gill pretty much spent a large portion of his football career as a player and coach in the Big 8 which is now the Big 12.

Turner Gill has a great track record as an assistant coach. He was an assistant at the University of Nebraska from 1989 to 2004. While there, he was the quarterback's coach for Heisman Trophy winner Eric Crouch in 2001. Gill was also part of the coaching staff that won three National Championships in 1994, '95 and '97.

As a head coach, Gill is not as impressive. His first stint at head coach was at the University of Buffalo which is in the Mid-American Conference. He was named coach in 2005 and from there took the program from terrible to mediocrity. He won the 2007 MAC coach of the year and in 2008 brought the Buffalo Bulls to their first ever bowl game, which they lost. He posted a total record of 22-32 during his tenure at Buffalo in a terrible conference. He also went 0 - 1,000,000 against BCS conference teams. Now, playing devil's advocate, the U of Buffalo is not an easy sell to recruits and he did win more games in the four years he was there than in the schools prior however many years the program has existed which makes him great right? Not necessarily. If you look at non-BCS conferences such as C-USA, WAC, and MWC, each conference has one or two dominant teams. If you look at the Mid-American Conference Buffalo should have dominated everyone. There are no teams in that conference that are worth writing home about. Thing of the type of football that is played between the MAC and the Big 12. The Big 12 has dominant programs such as Nebraska (for the time being), Texas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State (recently), Missouri, Texas A & M, and briefly Texas Tech (who hired Tommy Tuberville, a high profile coach who has actually won a National Championship with Auburn).

The way I look at it is that Turner Gill may be a good coach, but if he cannot dominate the Mid-American Conference playing teams like Temple, Ball State and Kent State, he will have issues in the Big 12. If I remember correctly, Temple University last year dominated the MAC pretty easily last year by posting 9 - 2 record and playing against UCLA in the EagleBank Bowl. Yes they did lose but they also had a better record throughout the year compared to Gill's 8 - 4 regular season in 2008.

I will leave the decision up to you on whether Gill was a good hire or not. In my opinion I believe that KU could have gotten someone a little more well-known but I guess it is not like KU has some huge football program in the first place. All-in-all I am excited for basketball season in two weeks! And please feel free to make comments on this post, this is my first one so any feedback is good feedback.

Brief side notes:

Turner Gill won MAC coach of the year 2007-08, the same year that KU's coach Mark Mangino won Paul "Bear" Bryant Coach of the Year.

Turner Gill lost a non-BCS bowl game in 2007-08 season. Mark Mangino won the BCS Orange Bowl giving KU the first ever BCS Bowl victory. This game was won over the heavily touted Virginia Tech team.

Thanks for reading! The next post will probably be after the first basketball game! Rock Chalk Jayhawks!