Jerry Kill at Minnesota: What might have been

Minnesota Gophers football hasn't been a perennial loser in the last 10 years.

But it has been a near-perennial mediocrity in that time, and that's a tough sell in a professional market.

Minnesota's last share of a Big Ten football title was 1967. Lou Holtz spent two years there in the mid-1980s and fled. No one since has made the program a consistent winner. Glen Mason's 2003 Gophers won the Sun Bowl to finish with a 10-3 record, but that was the pinnacle. Mason got sacked three years later.

Jerry Kill did a very good job taking the Gophers from a bad place after the 2010 end of Tim Brewster's 4-year tenure as coach. Minnesota was 4-4 in the Big Ten in Kill's third season and 5-3 last year. The 2014 Gophers went to the Citrus Bowl, the best bowl a Minnesota team had experienced since the 1962 Rose.

Yes, it's been over a half-century since Minnesota last played in a bowl that America cares about.

How high the ceiling was for the program under Kill had he been fortunate enough to have good health instead of the epilepsy that caused him to retire Wednesday we'll never know. Maybe the 8-5 overall marks of 2013 and 2014 he hit last year would have been as good as it got. But I think he would have won a West Division title at some point.

The Gophers' on-campus stadium that opened in 2009 surely has had a positive impact on the program, and the go-ahead last year to build a $70 million football complex would only have been a big asset for Kill in luring players from all over America to the cold of Minnesota.

He showed wherever he went, including Minnesota, that he could mold programs into winners. There may not be a coaching staff in the nation that had greater continuity. Kill's assistants followed him from stop to stop. Interim head coach/defensive coordinator Tracy Claeys has been with Kill for 21 years, and is highly regarded himself.

While Kill didn't get Minnesota to a Big Ten title game or a bowl victory, his teams did get several wins that elevated how the program was perceived.

The 51-14 clubbing the Gophers gave Iowa last year in Minneapolis was the kind of thing the fans up there simply weren't accustomed to experiencing. That came four games after Minnesota had left Michigan with a 30-14 victory, which broke a 6-game losing streak to the Wolverines.

The Gophers elevated their profile even further two weeks after the Iowa game with their 28-24 win at Nebraska. That made their game at Wisconsin the following week a winner-take-all for the West title.

I went to Madison to cover that game. Wisconsin pulled away for a 34-24 triumph, but I was impressed with how competitive and physical the 14-point underdog Gophers were. I returned to Iowa thinking Minnesota wasn't going to be going away anytime soon.

But life happens, and Kill's health has forced the school to reboot its football program. This year's team has been injury-ravaged, and was rolled by Northwestern and Nebraska.

Looking at Minnesota's remaining schedule this season, it's not hard to see the team going from its current 1-2 Big Ten record to a final mark of 2-6. The Gophers had the bad draw of getting Michigan and Ohio State from the East this year while Iowa and Wisconsin got two-team combinations out of Maryland, Indiana and Rutgers.

You always hear people say such-and-such job is a great opportunity and School X should have no trouble attracting great candidates. But then the jobs open and the candidate pools don't always seem as deep or as filled with hot names as you would have thought. And there are going to be a lot of openings for hot names.

Minnesota has the advantage of time to get this hire right. But right now it's a school with an interim director of athletics as well as an interim head football coach.

Sometimes stability and patience aren't the worst things in the world, though I'm not naming names (Iowa).