Jerry Kill now taking on new challenges at Rutgers

Rutgers offensive coordinator Jerry Kill is settling in at his new position and now that his tenure has begun, he is facing quite a few challenges when it comes to helping redirect the program back to its winning ways.

Early this afternoon, Kill spoke about how coaching is going to help Rutgers improve during the 2017 season.

“The No.1 thing is I think we’ve put a good staff together. Lester Erb was a big hire for us. I have a guy coming in in quality control who has been with K-State’s offense for seven years. That’s important. I told the offensive staff that I don’t want to hear about it’s the players’ fault. It is our fault. It is our job to get the players on the field, it is our job to teach them. If we get out-atheleted and they are just better than us, what are you going to do? But there are a lot of games in there we could have won last year. We just didn’t finish the job.”

Kill has faced similar rebuilding challenges over the course of his coaching career. His most recent success came as the head coach at Minnesota, and he mentioned how he was able to engineer that turnaround.

“Getting the players to believe. First of all, you had to do exactly what Chris [Ash] did. You had to come in with a plan and a vision of how we are going to do it. I don’t know how it was here, but usually when you take a job academics area mess. [Minnesota's] APR was a mess, GPA was a 2.1. We had 24 kids on academic probation. So I had to hire some more academic people, and I think now they had nine straight semesters over a 3.0. I had to make sure that players understood that going to class and being on time and doing what you’re supposed to equals wins on a football field, too.

“We wanted discipline throughout the whole program. I am a hard-nosed guy, so we sold them on that equaling wins. It was not easy to do, but as recruiting comes in, you change the culture in that locker room. As you change that culture, you get what you want. I think that is exactly what Chris is doing.”

At Rutgers, one of the main challenges comes with finding the right personnel.

“We have to recruit the foundation. We have to recruit to Rutgers,” Kill said. “Everybody gets caught up on this guy being a 13-star or whatever the hell that is. It is more important to me to recruit to your culture and what you want out of your football team and who you want to be. That is the most important thing. I go back to [Bill] Belichick and New England. You can name three or four players on their team but the rest of them no one really knows about sometimes. He recruits to his culture. I think that’s what we’ve got to do here, and that’s what we are doing.”

Another one of the challenges facing this new-look RU coaching staff is instilling a winning mentality among its players.

“I think the biggest challenge for coaches is to get the confidence of the players, and we know what we are doing. We are going to be better,” Kill said. “When you have been losing for a while, that is a bad habit. We have to get them to where they believe they can win. The way you do that is you have to build confidence, and we need to get tougher mentally and physically, all those things. But I think the big thing is that we have to convince them they can win. There is no reason we can’t win here at Rutgers. To me, there are no excuses.”