Jerry Kill strode to the podium in a speckled gray shirt, TCU baseball cap and a full beard and gave a smile to the assembled media members Tuesday.
"I haven't done this since the University of Minnesota," he said in his Kansas drawl. "See if I'm rusty or not."
More than six years after he last was a head football coach — Oct. 28, 2015, to be exact — Kill will be back leading a team Saturday as interim coach for TCU, which faces No. 12 Baylor in Fort Worth, Texas.
Kill, who retired as Gophers coach because of health concerns from epilepsy, has been a special assistant in charge of offense for longtime Horned Frogs coach Gary Patterson the past two seasons. Patterson parted ways with TCU on Sunday, and Kill was tapped to take over for his good friend for the final four games of the season.
“It's not going to be easy. Last I knew, life isn't easy. There's no guarantees. You've got to handle adversity. If you can't handle a little adversity, you're not going to make it in this world.”
The Horned Frogs (3-5, 1-4 Big 12) are on a three-game losing streak and have fallen back to the conference pack the past four seasons after a run in which they won 11 games and finished in the Associated Press top 10 three times in a four-year span. The downturn led to the ouster of Patterson, who is TCU's career wins leader and has a statue in his honor on campus.
Last weekend was a whirlwind for the 60-year-old Kill, who was thrust into the interim role after Patterson rejected TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati's offer to finish the season. Kill took over Monday, running practice, developing a game plan for Baylor and trying to get his team through suddenly turbulent times.
"I've got all kinds of text messages – I can't count 'em all," he said. "I haven't returned one of them. I ain't got time. … I've got to make sure I take care of the football team."
Ever since he retired from the Gophers job, Kill hasn't shaken the coaching bug. He spent 2016 at Kansas State as associate athletic director with football responsibilities, then became offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Rutgers in 2017.
In 2018, he landed as athletic director at Southern Illinois, a program he coached from 2001-07. A year later, he was back on the sideline as a special assistant to Virginia Tech coach Justin Fuente.
Along the way, he's dealt with epilepsy and in September of 2017, he was hospitalized because of seizures a day after suffering one on the sideline during Rutgers' game against Eastern Michigan. This season, he suffered a concussion when he was knocked to the turf during a postgame scuffle between TCU and SMU players. Kill didn't address his health during Tuesday's news conference.
Kill's approach in TCU's final four games is to both honor Patterson by continuing his work and help ease the transition for the Horned Frogs players.
"It's not going to be easy. Last I knew, life isn't easy," Kill said. "There's no guarantees. You've got to handle adversity. If you can't handle a little adversity, you're not going to make it in this world."
Kill will call on his experience in improving programs at Southern Illinois, Northern Illinois and Minnesota in his final four games at TCU.
"I've built programs and built them up, and this is unusual to take one over with four games left," he said. "But really the principles and those things don't change. You just do what you do, and you owe it to the kids. I didn't get in the business for money. I got in the business because of kids."
