The way it ended still bothers him.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause the people treated me so good,\u201d he said. \u201cI was on a good roll. You can\u2019t control what happens to you with a health situation. I\u2019ve had to battle that stuff my whole life. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cI was at the pinnacle, and we had things going and working on the new facility [Athletes Village]. I hit my head against that wall so hard. I gave every ounce I could to Minnesota. I mean every single ounce. Eventually, you\u2019ve got to be able to sleep and you\u2019ve got to be able to eat and I wasn\u2019t doing any of it. All I could do was think about Minnesota football, and I gave everything I had. I look back at it and if I had been able to stay healthy, who knows what would happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always wondered if Kill should have asked to take a leave of absence rather than retire abruptly. He brought up that theory unprompted in our phone conversation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know a lot of people said you could have taken a year off,\u201d he said. \u201cThat would have killed recruiting. It would have killed the program. You can\u2019t take a year off and then come back, not with recruiting. I did what I had to do, and I didn\u2019t cheat Minnesota.\u201d<\/p>\n
The desire to coach returned as his health improved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The way it ended still bothers him. \u201cBecause the people treated me so good,\u201d he said. \u201cI was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-259377","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}