I just finished watching the USC/Minnesota game in which the Gophers came up a field goal short of pulling off the upset. (And by "just finished, I mean it ended an hour ago and decided to take a shower before writing this. And by "watching", I mean that it was on one of my browser tabs, since none of the antennas I buy work on my TV, thus not allowing me to legally watch the game.)

I'm assuming that this will be counted as a moral victory to most, since the team did so poorly last year. And I'm assuming now the expectations are higher for the season/future, and most people are expecting big things from the new head football coach Jerry Kill. But I'm still not on the bandwagon. And it's not because of anything on-field related, but rather for completely objective/reliant-solely-on-hindsight reasons.

But, they are reasons that I'm about 98% sure will prevent Jerry Kill from being an effective coach for our team.

To be a good coach (or, basically, to be successful in anything), you need to have a good name and a good look. Jerry Kill has none of those things. I am going to break it down for you right here.

THE NAME:
When you think about the best coaches in football history, they all had pretty great names. Joe Paterno. Vince Lombardi. Paul Bear Bryant. Bill Belichick. Knute Rockne. Of course, most of these guys have been successful for additional reasons other than their name.... but it's the name that is the primary reason they're considered the best of the best. It instills fear. It demands respect. It makes players want to play for them. It's pretty much a fact of life, too--you need a great name in order to be successful. (I, on the other hand, have an absolutely great name, and yet I've been wildly unsuccessful in my life. But there's still hope... thanks to my name.)

Jerry Kill has a very conflicting name. His last name is absolutely great, perfect for such a brutal sport like football. If I were a college recruit looking at potential schools, and I had a little pamphlet of all the schools to choose from, and on that pamphlet it listed just the last name of all the school's coaches, you could rest assured I'd be choosing Minnesota in a heartbeat.

But the name Jerry ruins all of that. It, to put it simply, is not a football name. Jerry is not a football coach you want to play for. Jerry is the uncle you have that has two children and works as a plumber. Jerry is the guy that you know does something in your office but you can't quite place what exactly he does. Jerry is the overly friendly middle aged cashier at the supermarket. I mean, if those types of things are what you're aspiring for, Jerry's a great name. But how is a guy named Jerry supposed to convince teenagers to play for Minnesota? It just isn't happening.

THE LOOK

Again, let's look at the names I listed above of some of the greatest football coaches. Paul Bear Bryant--the fedora. Joe Paterno and Vince Lombardi--classy looking motherf*****s. Bill Belichick--well, he dresses like a hobo. But he looks like a brilliant, bitter, and grumpy math genius, so it doesn't matter how he dresses. Knute Rockne--I don't know what he looks like, but it's probably "great football coach" like. All of these guys look the part in their own way, which thus obviously has a subconscious effect on how they coach.

Jerry Kill looks like this:


OK. We have already discovered that the bald + mustache combination is not an effective strategy when we had Brad Childress coaching the Vikings, whose bad mustache affected his coaching ability and turned him into a moron. (He flirted with a full beard for a while, and thus looked a lot better... but the mustache had already done its dirty work.) In essence, the mustache makes Coach Kill look stupid and will probably make him coach stupid.

Now, don't get me wrong, a mustache does not always make you look bad. Couple of examples:


But in order to pull it off--like Ron Swanson and the Iron Sheik do--you have to be pretty much a mountain of a man. (Which Ron Swanson and the Iron Sheik both are.) Jerry Kill is not that type. Jerry Kill looks like the short, fat and inept beat cop in a bad 50's Abbott & Costello movie. So the mustache has got to go, for sure.

But even then, I don't know if that would help. He still has that stocky look to him that would not inspire me to view him as a brilliant football mind. So again, if I were a football recruit, I would probably pass on the Gophers in order to go play for Penn St and Joe Paterno, who still has that great football coach even if he looks like he's on the precipice of death everytime he's on screen.

HOW TO FIX THIS:

But of course, I don't want to completely write off the guy simply because he doesn't fit my foolproof criteria. So he deserves a chance to improve his coaching skills--and he does that by altering his name and his appearance.

To fix his name, he obviously needs to drop the Jerry portion of it. What I would probably do is insist to the media that no one is allowed to refer to him as "Jerry", and instead insist on being referred to as "Coach Kill" at all times. Maybe even going so far as to make Coach the legal first name. That, or simply go by just the last name. Kill. Wait, no. He has to capitalize the letters too, in order to make him sound like secret evil organization hellbent on ruling the world. The man, the coach--KILL. The coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers. I like it.

As far as changing his appearance... well, there's a little bit more work to be done. You can't simply shave the mustache, so what I would do is make a claim that the coach has been in a horrible accident, one that required facial reconstruction to be done--which was subsequently botched, leaving Coach Kill a disfigured mess. Thus, wherever he goes, he must wear a black mask to indicate the parts of his face that were badly disfigured--maybe a mask that covers everything except the right eye area. I think that'd look good. He'd have to ditch the glasses in that case, I presume.

He also needs to dress in a sharp, all-black suit in order to get people to look past the stockiness. And a nice, black fedora... not necessarily ripping off the Bear Bryant look, but I guess updating it for the 21st century. Also, I think he needs a cape. No football coach has ever had a cape before.

If Jerry Kill does all of those things, then I'm pretty sure he'll go down as one of the most successful college coaches of all time. If he doesn't... well, then he'll probably have the team going 7-5 a couple years down the road. And basically, no one cares about 7-5 teams...

But I'd watch every game if I had a Phantom of the Opera hybrid coach named KILL coaching my team. That'd be awesome.

And then maybe after we've won multiple titles and KILL's career is winding down, you could have a rival coach rip off the mask, revealing that KILL's face is actually not disfigured. And that it was all psychological as the coach merely thought his face was horribly damaged... and then we'd blow a three touchdown lead in the national championship game.

Why hasn't this not happened already?