Turner Gill's job this week is to convince the Buffalo Bulls that they can upset Penn State. He'll point out all the upheaval this season in college football. He'll tell them that anything can happen between noon and 3 p.m. on Saturday when they're at Beaver Stadium.
"Whether you're a favorite or not a favorite, all you have to be is the best football team for about three hours," he said yesterday.
But before he got to this point, he needed to build trust. Gill, a second year head coach, inherited a perennial NCAA bottom-feeder. But he's trying to change that by building a comfort level with his players that's rooted in open dialogue. So he brought in players to learn about them. They left knowing more about him as a person, not just the football coach.
The players probably knew about his playing days at Nebraska, when he led the Huskers to No. 2 and 3 rankings in the early 1980s. They probably didn't know about some difficulties he dealt with growing up.
"I think building a relationship with the young men, getting them to know how I am. Where I came from. How I got to do what I'm doing. And how do I do what I do," Gill said. "It's trust. Trust is earned and it takes time. That's so valuable to changing the culture, to know we're here for them; we're going to love them, but we're going to push them."
That's why he'd be sure to talk with all of them when he arrived a little more than a year ago.
"You'd have to give him good marks on his coaching," Joe Paterno said. "I've only ever watched two games he coached, so it's hard for me to tell you, but I think he's doing a good job."
The Bulls are 1-1 this season, suffering a lopsided loss to Rutgers in Week 1 and blowing out Temple last week. Buffalo has gone 3-11 so far in Gill's tenure.
This is the ninth year Buffalo has played in the Football Bowl Subdivision, formerly I-A. The Bulls were 3-8 in 2001, their best season.
To empathize with any personal or team problems, Gill told the players life wasn't always easy for him. It'd be a way, he thought, to help them work through the difficulty.
He would tell them about how he was Nebraska's third-string quarterback as a sophomore and how he had to battle to gain the starting job. Or how, playing in his first series of collegiate football against Utah, he was hit so violently near his mouth that he'd need a root canal to repair one of his front teeth.
"I try to bring back things that happened in their lives," Gill said. "I understand because I had some difficult things happen to me, too."
Like when he was 8 years old and his father was seriously injured, forcing his mother to work two or three jobs and leaving him to sleep at his aunt or uncle's place.
His father, Turner Sr., was a janitor cleaning a regional bank in Fort Worth when he slipped and ended up falling from the second floor to the first. His father was "practically paralyzed" and spent significant time in the hospital, Gill said.
To Gill, it's about more than just learning about his athletes. He said he's interested in building a solid relationship to help them mature on and off the field. And, in the process, maybe it'll help the struggling program.
"Maybe there's going to be tough times with us, and wins and losses, but we can overcome it," Gill said. "When you show them that people overcome things you can understand it and work through it and preserver through it."
