Who is Jerry Kill? TCU’s interim football coach has much in common with Gary Patterson
The new head football coach at TCU has a lot in common with his predecessor.
Jerry Kill, like Gary Patterson, who resigned Sunday night after 21 seasons as the Horned Frogs head coach, was born and raised in a small Kansas town near Wichita.
Kill, 60, was named the interim TCU coach for the final four games of the season. He had been an assistant to the head coach the past two seasons.
Kill is from Cheney, Kansas, with a population of about 2,000. Patterson is from Rozel, Kansas, which had a population of about 120 people in 2019. The towns are about two hours and a lot of wheat fields apart.
Both coaches had stints at Pittsburgh State — Patterson as linebackers coach in 1988 and Kill as defensive coordinator from 1985-87 and offensive coordinator from 1991-93.
Both eventually rose to Division I prominence. Patterson was named head coach at TCU in December 2000. Kill was head coach at Minnesota from 2011-15 after head stints at Southern Illinois (2001-07) and Northern Illinois (2008-10).
During the 2013 season with the Golden Gophers, Kill suffered a seizure that sidelined him while he was treated for epilepsy.
Kill joined Patterson’s staff after serving in a similar position at Virginia Tech in 2019.
Even though Kill wasn’t technically one of Patterson’s 10 assistants, he had the strongest voice in the offensive room. Patterson referred to Kill as the “head coach of the offense.”
As Kill put it shortly after taking the job, “I’m the ‘check mark guy’ on offense. Like he always says, I’m the head coach on offense. He says what I say goes. If I need to get on somebody, I can. I’m the boss of the offensive coaches.”
Kill has been known as a “fixer” over the years, turning around programs at Southern Illinois, Northern Illinois and Minnesota. He is 152-99 in his career, including a 29-29 mark in five seasons at Minnesota.
Kill retired from his head coaching for health reasons during the 2015 season with Minnesota. He spent time as an associate athletic director at Kansas State in 2016 before returning to coaching as Rutgers’ offensive coordinator in 2017. He then returned to Southern Illinois as a special assistant to the chancellor in 2018 and eventually became the school’s athletic director.
He stayed in the athletic director role through September 2019 before joining Virginia Tech and later TCU.
This story was originally published October 31, 2021 at 10:08 PM.
