KU football stuck between nice guy and a hard place

Glen Mason has spent his entire adult life in the crazy game of college football, picking up nuggets of wisdom along the way.

As a young head coach at Kent State in 1987, he beat Kansas so soundly that the Jayhawks hired him to be their next coach a few months later. He built a soft KU program into a rugged bunch that competed with its peers during nine seasons in Lawrence, then left for Minnesota. There, he won at a higher rate than any Golden Gophers coach since World War II but was shown the door after 10 seasons.

Minnesota is now onto its second coach since firing Mason in 2006, but you won't detect much bitterness from the 61-year-old retired coach. There is a simple formula that governs college football, and Mason sees himself as just one of many casualties.

"There's only two things in athletics, results and hope," Mason says. "There's a lot more hope out there than results because results are too hard to get. People get impatient and they want better results. You get nine wins a year, but they want 12 wins a year. Rather than sitting down and figuring it out, you make a change. You buy new hope."

Mason is speaking generally, but he's also getting right to the heart of the current conundrum at Kansas, where the results aren't there under Turner Gill and hope has evaporated into the cool autumn air. When both results and hope are gone, a coach finds himself in deep trouble.

KU athletic director Sheahon Zenger will make a decision on Gill's future after Saturday's Border War at Arrowhead Stadium, and, barring a major upset by the Jayhawks, he'll be looking at a dire situation. And Mason knows what that means.

"Typically, when you buy new hope," Mason says, "if they had a really tough, disciplined program, they'll go the other way. They'll buy new hope, and then they'll go back to the tough, disciplined coach again."

This is now the pattern at KU, and Mason knows it all too well. He was hired to take over for a nice man named Bob Valesente, who was let go after two seasons in which Kansas went 4-17-1. Mason brought a Marine-like approach and got the program on solid footing. After Mason left, Kansas hired another nice guy, Terry Allen, who went 20-33 in five seasons and failed to get KU to a bowl game.

The rest of the narrative is more fresh, of course. The Jayhawks hired a mean son of a gun in Mark Mangino, who led them to four bowl games in eight years, including a 12-1 season in 2007 and an Orange Bowl victory. Mangino was forced to resign after the 2009 season because of his alleged mistreatment of players, and former KU athletic director Lew Perkins tabbed the largely unproven Gill to take the program to even greater heights, giving him a five-year, $10 million contract.

Looking back, the day Gill was introduced as coach was surreal. Perkins called it a "magic moment." A KU player, Brad Thorson, read aloud a Facebook message he had received from a University of Buffalo player had written him, assuring the Jayhawks they were getting a great man.

Months later, Joe Ehrmann, an author and speaker who believes in positive coaching, said in an interview, "America needs Turner Gill to be successful at Kansas."

It is always a noble idea to hire a nice guy to run a college football team. But Gill has gone 5-18 in two seasons, his team losing games in ways that boggle the imagination, and it's become increasingly clear once again that nice guys have a hard time winning in Lawrence.

There may not have been a tougher KU player during the Mangino era than Joe Mortensen, a starting linebacker from 2006-08.

Mortensen, who is pursuing a mixed martial arts career, met Gill in the summer of 2010 when Mortensen returned to the Anderson Family Football Complex.

"He's an awesome guy," Mortensen says. "Very nice."

Gill told Mortensen that this was his university and his weight room and to make himself at home. That made Mortensen feel welcome, so he started working out at the facility like old times. Except, it wasn't same at all.

"It just seemed more laid-back," Mortensen says. "It was definitely calmer. Guys weren't stressed out as much."

Mangino built his program by taking guys who were considered less talented and developed them in the weight room and on the practice field. He hired Chris Dawson, who worked for Mason at Minnesota, as his strength and conditioning coach.

"Ugh, Coach Dawson was really demanding," says former KU cornerback Calvin Rubles. "I know I didn't like it when I was doing it, but I loved the results of it."

Rubles was a junior transfer who played under Mangino in 2009 and Gill in 2010. He says one difference he noticed from the beginning was the culture in the weight room. Gill hired John Williams away from Baylor to run his strength program.

"It was not as demanding as Coach Dawson was the first year," Rubles says, "but I've heard that it's picked up a lot since then. (Williams) has been doing it for 15-plus years, so I'm sure he knows how to get his athletes ready to play."

When Dawson was let go by Kansas, it came as no surprise when Kansas State coach Bill Snyder hired him to do the same job at K-State. The Wildcats have beaten KU 59-7 and 59-21 the last two seasons — both times in Lawrence — and are 9-2 and ranked No. 16 heading into their final game.

Mortensen knows what it takes to win big in the state of Kansas, and he feels bad for the last two classes of seniors at KU that have gone out on such a sour note. Mortensen wants to be a coach once he's done with MMA, and he has an idea for what Kansas needs.

"It's a mixture of both," Mortensen says. "Coach Mangino was a good businessman, a good coach, and the discipline was always there. If anything, it was too much. But at the same time, you gotta have that kind of respect. I haven't played for Coach Gill, and I'm sure a lot of the guys play hard for him. But you've got to have a happy medium.

"You're not going to get those four- and five-star recruits like Texas and Oklahoma. You need tough strength coaches and tough position coaches. But at the same time, you've got to have that goodness in you. You've got to make sure the players know that you care for them and you'll be there for them. That's the kind of coach I want to be."

Rubles enjoyed playing for Gill because he felt like Gill wanted to know him on a personal level. While Gill has an "open-door policy," Mangino was all business.

"Players couldn't just go talk to Mangino," Rubles says.

Gill also has an opposite approach of getting the players' attention.

"He motivates you in a different way than yelling," Rubles says. "If you don't want to go hard, you'll be replaced by someone who will."

Rubles believes that Gill can win at Kansas — he just needs time. KU's current players, who have lost nine games in a row, are at least publicly saying the same thing. At the very least, they don't want to go through another coaching transition this soon.

"In a lot of ways, it turns your veterans into new players," KU quarterback Jordan Webb said. "It's not easy to learn a whole new system, whether you're a senior or a freshman. That's one of the biggest problems with it."

Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne understands the challenges of building a program, and he understands Gill, his former quarterback and longtime friend. He hopes Zenger will stay the course.

"My perception is that probably when he got there the talent was down," Osborne says. "They lost their defensive coordinator (Carl Torbush) this last summer on very short notice. Two years, I think, for almost any coach inheriting that situation, is probably not enough."

Whether the Kansas program in 2010 was stocked with the type of players that a good coach could mold into winners is an argument that could go on forever. The only thing that matters is that they haven't resembled a competitive team often enough the last two seasons.

Gill was hired at Kansas because he took a Buffalo program with no highly-regarded talent and won a Mid-American Conference championship in his third season. His philosophy and methods have not brought similar success in the Big 12, but, then again, it is not yet Year 3.

"Next year being the third year will be a turning point for the program," says Drew Willy, who was Gill's quarterback at Buffalo his first three seasons. "I know the third year was big for us. It just seemed like things were much smoother. He needs a little more time. He'll definitely get it done."

The question is, will he get the chance?

Glen Mason's daughter, Mallory, is a sophomore at Kansas. He has visited her several times and knows the lay of the land in Lawrence these days.

Mason still can't believe the luxury that KU football has now in the $31 million Anderson Family Football Complex, which he says is on par with the best in the nation.

"What they've done with that football building," Mason says, "is something I never thought in my wildest imagination they could do at Kansas."

Mason remembers when the football team's meeting room was a closet in Allen Fieldhouse. That accurately reflected where the program stood in the eyes of the administration and the fans back then, but KU has come a long way in the last two decades.

Mason sees no reason Kansas football shouldn't be successful. The Jayhawks just have to have the right coach, and maybe they do with Gill right now.

Of course, as a man who recruited tough players and coached them accordingly, Mason is more than a bit partial to the old-school way.

"I don't think it's just Kansas," Mason says. "People say, so-and-so was a really tough coach, and they think that's mean. That's not the case. I took a Marine approach. What I always thought was, you go through this training, and it'd be real tough, and they'd want to quit and desert. But once they become a Marine, they're proud for life. They look back and say, 'Man, that was terrible,' but it was worth every bit of it."

This story was originally published November 23, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "KU football stuck between nice guy and a hard place."