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UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA MEDIA CONFERENCESeptember 20, 2011Jerry KillCOACH KILL: Thanks for everybody being here. We are hard in preparation for North Dakota State, a team that I have great respect for, and somebody that I know a lot about through the years. I've got great respect for their coach. Been watching their film. It's a football team that plays tremendously hard. They reflect their head coach. He's a hard-nosed guy. And they play that way. They do not take plays off. That's something that we can learn from here at the University of Minnesota. But they play as hard as anybody that we play to this point in time. And I think you all know, being here from the State of Minnesota, that they have had pretty good fortune over the past I believe four or five years. Guys are going to have to help me today -- 2007, correct? Q. 2006. COACH KILL: They came in and won. And then it took a blocked field go to win the other one. So I think that that should tell us something. So I will tell you that I think that this game and no disrespect to anybody else on our schedule, no disrespect to Miami, we'll have to play better than we did against Miami to win. And you know, that is what it is. So with that, I'll answer any questions. Q. How do you feel? COACH KILL: I'm okay. I'm okay. Just moving, moving forward, trying to move a little forward. So I'm doing okay. Thanks for asking. I appreciate it. Q. What was your interaction with Coach Knight yesterday? COACH KILL: I think that has a lot more to do with Sid, and Sid has had a long-standing relationship with Coach Knight. I think Coach Knight talked with Sid, and you would have to ask Sid more about. That I think that's more of a fair question. But he did come up to the office. And you know, I think you all know Bob Knight's old school, and he said, "There's very few left that are old school," and he said, "Coach, I think you're a little bit old school." I said, "I take that as a compliment." So it was good to have him in our office. I don't think you can ever get enough education being a coach, and you certainly need to listen to people that have been coaching the game as long as he has and it doesn't matter what game it is, whether it's football or basketball. You know, you can learn from people that have done it a long time, and certainly somebody that's in the Hall of Fame, and I think anybody that's followed his career, he likes football coaches and he likes football. You know, him and Parcells were hooked up there pretty close for a lot of years. So a lot of knowledge that came out of that room, and it's certainly a good moment for all of the people that had the opportunity to spend some time with him and we are very appreciative of Sid giving us the opportunity to spend the time with Coach Knight. Q. Can you talk about the expansion of MarQueis and what you might be able to additionally give him going forward? COACH KILL: Well, I think to be honest with you, and I compliment the guys that are a couple of rooms back there, is that we have had to -- we tried to be something that we can't be here right now, first two games. And so we are trying to do what we can do with the kids that we have, and that's no disrespect to these kids, but we had been in the system for three or four years. These kids have been in five different systems. And so we worry about what everybody tells us; we have got to take, like I said, infant steps. So we have got some things back. And I think we are finding out now, just like -- it ain't about what you do. It's how you execute it. And he executed better, you know, frankly on Saturday, better than he did the first two games. He's improved on each of those games, and I think, you know, when I -- I could tell when we got into the game early, that from the sideline to the play call to the tempo of the guys getting in and out of the huddle, he made some checks, some things that he was doing you felt like he felt like he was a quarterback and that he was not up there processing information. You know, he was ready to go play. I think the first two games was difficult because he was processing. He was still learning, and he's still going to learn. You know, this thing's not an easy thing. But he's a gifted athlete. And his gift of being an athlete certainly helped us on Saturday. He got us in some good plays and got out of some tough plays, and then I think his comfortability, you would have to ask him, I think Shortell, Max, has helped him in the fact that I think he knows Max is there; if he gets physically tired and whether he's running the ball or need to get a break, that he can come out and we can put Max in there. So those two have worked real good together and there's not a bunch of egos there, and you know, at the bottom line is, we want to try to win. But I think his progression is -- you know, is going pretty good. It's easy to learn in practice. It's hard on Saturday. Again, we are not even to the Big Ten schedule, and you know, let's say -- let's say MarQueis would have played last year six ballgames as a starting quarterback, just think of where he would be at now. You know, he's still, you know, learning. So I compliment him. He's working hard at it and that's all we can ask him to do. He's getting better. Q. Can you think how hard Northwestern -- their roster is filled with kids that wanted to be recruited -- COACH KILL: I know I hear about it every day. Q. -- not being good enough -- COACH KILL: I understand. Q. These kids want to give it their best shot in their one shot here. COACH KILL: Well, I've heard about it since I took the job. Shoot, I was told I wasn't good enough for the job. So, hell, I'm one of those guys. You don't think I don't compete or I don't think about that from a day-to-day basis? So you bet your tail end they are going to come in here and be ready to play, and they are going to play with a chip on their shoulder. North Dakota State has made a living off Minnesota kids for a long time. I played against them when I was at Pittsburgh State when Rocky Hager was there and I was offensive coordinator and we were both running split back veer, and shoot we were drawing 25,000 people at the Dome and we were the ones that opened the Dome when I was at Pittsburgh State. So I have a long time of history. So you don't have to convince me and tell me how hard those young bucks are going to play. That's a subject that doesn't need to be discussed. I know they are going to play their best game, and I know they are going to play hard. I've got to make sure I our kids understand that. And, you know, if they don't understand it, they are not very educated, because it is what it is. They got beat in 2006 here and they had to block a field goal. So you need to take all that -- I lived with that I-AA and Division II label and all that, and I'm the same guy that we were I-AA and we went to Indiana and kicked their butt. Those things you can throw out the door. That's why college football is such a great sport. You don't know who is going to win from week-to-week. That's why you play. It don't matter what damn level it is, you'd better hook it up. They have some good players now, I'm telling you. So I mean, you're not going to hear me say anything, because I know. I've lived it. Now, some of these people may not have lived it, and we have got some kids in the program that should have lived it still. Ben (ph) ought to remember it. So hopefully he'll get the message across. We certainly made that. But we really, to be honest with you, if our kids are very smart and they watch the film from last week, hell, we've got to get a lot better. We are still a long way from being very good. So, we have got to get better. I'm more worried about us getting better. I mean, even in the New Mexico State, in the loss, there's things that got better in that game, even though the game was lost. There was some things that got better, and so we have got a lot of room for improvement to make and we know. That. You know, to me, this is a huge game for us, it really is. We need to get better. We need to play well. I think the game is sold out. So you know, we need to get it done. Q. Going back to the New Mexico State game, you go out to Southern Cal, nobody gives you a chance to even be in the ballgame and then your kids are looking at this film of New Mexico State, I don't know if you showed it to them or not; and Ohio U beats them from 40 to 20 to 7. My feeling is that your kids have no reason to be overconfident, but they were not really ready to play against New Mexico State because they did beat a good team in Miami. COACH KILL: Well, since New Mexico, I've had about -- I don't know about how many damn seizures. I've had a hell of a lot of stuff happen to me since New Mexico State; so I can't remember my damn name sometimes. But I can tell you this from New Mexico State is that from that game, is that football is a strange game, and there's about three -- there's at least three times in that deal there should have been points, three touchdowns on the board. I don't think the kids did not play hard, and weren't ready to play and all that kind of stuff; why they didn't execute. And why they didn't execute that's our responsibility. Shoot, we probably gave them too much information for them to execute, so I'm not going to blame the kids. But we don't do a good enough job. We probably felt like yeah, we came off USC, we played good third and fourth quarter, we can move on, we can go a little faster here coaching. But through my coaching career, we have won most of the games we are supposed to win. And you can go back and look and we have done it. Do I feel bad about that game? Hell, yeah, I mean, it's a game we should have won. Any time you got the ball inside the five, or whatever it was, three times and you don't get touchdowns, that's -- I'm used to being able to handle the damn ball off and stick it up somebody's tail end, but we didn't do it. I don't think it's -- the way to play, I don't think that there's -- we don't have, you know, where we are at in our program, there is no room for error, in any game we play, any game. We can play and we can win games. But there is no room for error. It's just like on Saturday, Miami, it shouldn't have gone down to the last play of the game against Miami. If we had kept contained on the quarterback and understand what leverage is, that game's over. So, we're lucky. We weren't so lucky against New Mexico State, you know, my opinion. We scored; we had the ball on the one-yard line and I feel like we scored. There ain't no question in my mind, but you no what, it shouldn't have been that close. If we were worth a damn, he would have scored and he's have ran it two yards in the end zone and we wouldn't have to question it. So there's just no room for error with our program where it's at and the kids playing, and they have got to understand that. So you're right, they have got to bring their A Game every week. And you watch the pros, hell, they can't bring their damn A Game every week. They take damn plays off and all. That that's why I do have respect for North Dakota State. They don't take no damn plays off. That's why they win. If we learn not to take any damn plays off, then we wouldn't have lost to New Mexico State. So it's a deal of getting the mentality built into a group of young people that, hey, you are not super human, forget the five-star bull. You need to learn how to play hard. That's it. Now, be don't write all that language in there (Laughter) but I'm pretty wired up so, it is what it is. Q. You're three games into the season, looking back, is this about what you expected? How is your perspective on this thing but how it's gone? COACH KILL: It's about, you know, to be honest with you, in some aspects, it's gone better. I can't explain being in the locker room on Saturday, you know, but I've been hard on these kids. You all have been to practice. And kids treating me well in the locker room, they didn't have to. I don't know if -- hopefully they meant it, but you know, there was -- I can't explain it. You have to be in the locker room to understand it. But I mean, to see their smiles -- hell, they want to win. They don't want to let you down. They want to win, and they want it; they are trying. So they are about where -- it ain't -- it ain't different anywhere else I've been. But it's -- we haven't been here long enough to get them to understand what it is. I mean, give me a break, I mean, you'd like to think you'd understand what leverage is, but you know what, it ain't that they -- they don't know. So we have got to teach them. John Wooden had them tie their shoes and pull their socks up. And as Coach Knight said yesterday, shoot, we don't do any of that any more. We just line them up and put them in these X's and O's and thinks we all coach everybody. That's a bunch of crap. We have got to learn the little things before we get the big things. And hell, it's going to take us a whole year to do that. And we are going to be in there, and you're going to say, god-dang, you got beat, you ain't worth a damn, you didn't have them ready to play. But the bottom line is, we've got to learn -- we have got to learn the little things before we get to the big things. And like I said, when I figure out, we don't understand what leverage is, you know, and it's college football, what the hell are we doing? We just have a lot of work to do. We have to educate our players, and teach them better, you know, get them in better situations and so forth. So hopefully we can get that done. But it's been the same everywhere I went. You know, but it's just that schedules have been easier some places. Like when I went to Southern, we got killed. I mean, Jack Harbaugh is beating us 60-6 and going, "Boy, Coach, you're doing a good job, you're going to turn it around." I thought, he's full of you-know-what. But you know what, two years later, we were winning and beating everybody's tail end, so he knew something I didn't know. He'd seen little progress in there and he'd seen the kids playing hard and those kind of things. And that's what I worry about. I'll call up an opposing coach -- I haven't talked to the coach from Miami, but Lane Kiffin dropped me a note. I listen to what they say. They ain't going to lie to me. I say: All right, what did you see on film? Did we play hard? I want to know. What do you see? So I think this is an evaluation period in our program. It's an evaluation period over these four weeks and it will be all year. Q. Did he send you a nice note? COACH KILL: He did. He told me to hang in there and it's a nice note. People throughout the country have been unbelievable. It's been unbelievable. Q. Can you talk a little bit about with your work ethic and the hours that you put in, with how you're managing your energy level right now? COACH KILL: I ain't changing. You know, I'm tired and I have my wife telling me I'm tired. I have some doctor telling me or whatever. You know, their job is to get it all figured out. They have got to get me on the right medication and all that kind of stuff. But I can't control what I can't control. I believe in one man and that's The Big Man upstairs, and I'm going to go like hell until I go down and then I go down, and they can do whatever they do and I'm going to go again. That's who I am. And I ain't changing. And if that ain't good enough -- well, I've been doing it now for six years, and I've coached pretty damn good the last six years and I'll coach pretty damn good for the next 15 years. It's one of those things where I can't worry about what I can't control. But I can go into a whole press conference about, I guess everybody knows, from having cancer, I've got a seizure disorder; and when you get your medication, you get dehydrated. And then they put medication in you; and you put different kinds of medication in your body, it don't work too good sometimes and ain't worked too damn good this time. So they need to get it figured out. And that's my wife's job and that's why I've been married 29 years; she's a hell of a woman and she's trying to get it figured out. We have got good medical people here, and they will eventually get it figured out. But what the hell am I supposed to do? Stop? I mean, sit in the chair and wait for the next god-dang seizure to come along? There's people that got them every day. I've had about 20 of them in the last six damn days, and I'm still walking, still coaching. And I knew what the hell I was doing on Saturday. I knew what I was doing when I called it on fourth down and nine. I didn't want to punt the damn ball, Sid, down there on the 32-yard line because I barely punt the damn thing out of the end zone; we would start on the 20, we would 12 yards; what the hell. (Laughter). Q. You can't afford motion penalties and missed extra points. COACH KILL: I know. Or you'll fire me or you'll put on that paper that you'll fire me, and you should. We can't. Q. We haven't fired you yet -- COACH KILL: Well, we are going to take care of it. Somebody just asked me, how do you take care of things? I'm going to take care of them just like Coach Knight said he figured I would take care of them. I can't comment on the officiating, so I'm not going to. But that's all I'll say there but I won't comment on it. Q. And scaling back the offense a little bit like you mentioned, how much of that has -- COACH KILL: That I want to make sure, because that's unfair to MarQueis. That has to do with everybody. That's nothing to do with MarQueis, shoot, if you look at our film, we have nine guys doing things pretty good; and there's one or two that are out to lunch and there's another guy we send in there, you say we had a motion penalty. Well, we put some youngster in there that's a young kid, we need to get him reps to play, hell, he's so damn nervous, he lines up in the wrong place. You know, we got one person on every dang thing. But we got kids that haven't played, man. It ain't like the NFL. Hell, those guys have been playing ten years. They shouldn't make a damn mistake in the NFL. They ought to fine their ass. But hell, we are college football. We are college -- we are college. I mean we got kids coming out of high school 17, 18, that are playing for us for 19 or 20, that, shoot, I'm telling you, they are going out there in front of, you know, all those people. They are nervous and what the hell is going to happen and then they come over to my joyous self when they make a mistake and get an earful. Mark has been over there on the sideline. I'm real polite to them when they make a mistake. Q. Inaudible. COACH KILL: No comment. Q. Have you sort of given MarQueis a little more green light to run? COACH KILL: Oh, that's -- I've done a great job of coaching old MarQueis. I said, "MarQueis, now you go get us 156 yards so the people of Minnesota like me a lot more." (Laughter). I haven't told him a damn thing. I told him -- I told him to execute the offense I think instinctively, he's pulled down. You know, we did some things because he's a though-pound kid. We are playing with 195-pound backs. He's 240-pound young man. So we are -- and we can formation things and we are utilizing his skill level the best of the ability. Y'all remember who was here when Rickey Foggie was here? Raise your hand if you were here when Rickey Foggie was here. And I would say -- all those guys, anybody -- but with Rickey, I remember because I was young growing up and all that, and the option football and some of the things we did. I said, he was going to -- you know, the thing about it, if you've got a guy, and again, you've got to remember now, I'm a split back veer option guy. I run the quarterback most of my career. Am I a littler nervous right now? Yeah, I'm real nervous, yeah. But Max Shortell has made me a little bit more comfortable in being a little bit more aggressive. The USC helped us because of what Shortell did, we could be more aggressive with MarQueis and what we do. Q. Is you disappointed in what he's done so far? COACH KILL: No, I'm not disappointed. He's named special teams Player of the Week. He blocked a punt. We probably don't win the game if it wasn't for the run. That running back, right now, again, we are not physically just physically, physically strong up front and those kids are still learning. And so he's going to have to make some yards on his own. The thing that -- I mean, the thing that I liked, you know, you are going to have to -- do we have a guy that can carry it 40 times? No. We said listen, Kirkwood is healthy, let's throw him in there. And he ran over a couple of safeties. I'm used to that physical0type thing. So that was a good thing. And hell, I may pull a redshirt off the freshman this week. You never tell what I'm going to do on Saturdays. But we have got to get more physical in my opinion. We are not physical enough. You know we can't have the ball at the end of the game. You talk about that game, the game should have, you know, you go back to New Mexico State, there's 21 points left out on the field. Saturday, you know, you've got to be good enough on offense, the defense should never have had to go pack on the field. We let them get back on the field. We shouldn't do that. If we run the ball good, we shouldn't let them back on the field. I would like to call Adrian Peterson up to see if he could come and play for three or four plays at the time. Devon is working hard, but again, we have no sense of -- we don't have no small room for error right now. And our kids, I want this perfectly known, and printed. Our kids are trying hard. They are playing hard. But sometimes, physically there's some different mismatches in there, and I can live with that, if they are playing hard. But if they don't play hard, that's a problem. Q. Berkeley (ph) was pretty good, though. COACH KILL: Yeah. He played hard. He did play hard. Q. Can you talk about physical mismatches, you're playing Miamis and New Mexico States, and then in the Big Ten, it's a step above. That so do you have to play a different style to take advantage of the speed? COACH KILL: We go from week-to-week-to-week-to-week to week. Your question is good, and you say, not every team in the Big Ten is the same, either. Wisconsin is a whole different creature than the Northwestern. And they are both darned good, you know what I'm saying. Every team is different in their physicality of what they do, every team in the Big Ten. I've played quite a few of them. They are all different. So I think you have to adjust from week-to-week in what you do. Again, I think that's a great question. But I think that's an adjustment that you have to do up front, offensively, from week-to-week. And you know, it's important and I know a few of you will come to practice today and say -- you don't say, well, Coach pulled a swift one on me. Lamonte Edwards, you'll see him playing some linebacker today. He's going to go down and play some linebacker today. I don't know if that's going to be permanent, but we feel like we have got some injuries there, and as long as this season is going to be, he's too good to just get ten, 15 plays. So we are going to experiment on Tuesday and Wednesday with him a little bit. Q. Is it because of Kirkwood -- COACH KILL: No, it's because of Coach Kill and getting the best players on the field. And Kirkwood has something to do with it, the redshirt freshman. Doesn't mean he won't still play some offense but we are thin. We are not deep. We have got some injuries on that side of the ball. I don't think we'll get Bill back for a long time. I'm answering your question going into the Big Ten schedule. So you know, we have got to make sure that we have some depth. So Tuesday and Wednesday, he's going to spend a lot of time with Coach Miller. I'm not going to tell you that's a permanent move, we are going to see how it goes and see how he picks it up. His high school coach has been calling Coach Claeys for I don't know how long since we have been here and said that's the side of the ball he needed to be on in the first place. Maybe his high school coach is right, and so we're going to take a look at him and see. Doesn't mean he won't come in and play on goal line, and he's had a lot of time on offense. But again we are dealt the cards we have, and we are going to try to utilize all those cards that we can. Q. What's your philosophy of playing -- North Dakota State, South Dakota State? COACH KILL: Well, I don't have no choice. I mean, the schedule is made. I mean, I can comment on what I like to do and what I want to do. Right now, you know, I just had that question asked, what are you going to do on schedule and three years from now when you only have three games. Hell, I've got -- I'm thinking about today's practice and how we are going to do in today's practice and what we are going to get better at. I really have not put tons of thought on it. It's one of those things, playing North Dakota State and the history of what's happened the last two times we have played them, you know, I'd rather play somebody else, you know. But is it good for the college football? Is it good for the state? Is it good for, you know, everybody? We have got a sold-out place. It's college football. It will be a great evening, all that kind of stuff. That's good. But I can tell you this, is that we have everything to lose. They have nothing to lose. When we came to Northern Illinois, hell, when we came to Minnesota, do you think I was going to leave any chips on the table if we had to? No. Didn't have to worry about it, you know. That's just how it is. It doesn't matter if it's -- and that I-AA, let me tell you something about I-AA. It's one of the greatest levels to coach at in the history of football. Because I-AA, you get 60 -- 63. You get 63 full rides. But you still get 85 on scholarship, all right. And at the time I was there, you have got the one-year transfers; I coached some guys, Brandon Jacobs -- I remember coaching kids now, at that level, but you can break up scholarships. So if you're not sure on a kid, okay, you can give him tuition and books, and then maybe he grows into something special. So you can roll the dice. But at this level, you can't roll no dice. APR, all that stuff, is a whole different game than what it is at this level. So you're talking about a level to coach at and get some players? I mean, let me tell you something. You don't think Appa State didn't have players when they went to play the University of Michigan? Let me tell you, Appa State, they can beat University of Michigan; they can beat a lot of teams. And I don't care what anybody says in the room, because I played them, I watched them. They were good. So all that stuff, it comes down to Saturday, you play the game, and the team that makes the least mistakes usually wins. And that's what it's going to come down to. Q. Inaudible. COACH KILL: What do you mean? Q. He's not injured -- he hasn't played yet. COACH KILL: No, not really. I guess got to get a little better -- Q. Trying to get bigger? COACH KILL: No. Q. Just not happy with him? COACH KILL: No, I'm happy with him. He's team player of the week this week and those kind of things and so forth. But I mean, there's no -- he has not gone out and drove around the block when he wasn't supposed to. No discipline problems off the field. As far as I know, he's not in a brown shirt. Just maybe I expect more, you know, at this point in time. I don't know. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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