Gill looks to turn the tide

Turner Gill may have felt a bit like a fish out of water when he arrived in Buffalo, unfamiliar with the city and far from a winning football program, but it seems to be something he has since taken in stride.

Amidst the blue couches, blue chairs and blue carpets of his UB Stadium office, the first-time head coach has already started to make himself comfortable. Gill has begun to assess the team's problems and consider solutions, as well as meet his players with a series of sit-down talks with each student-athlete on his roster.

"I'm going through the process of meeting with every player on the football team individually, getting to know them a lot better, letting them get to know me, and we get a chance to be one and one and not just see me as a guy just talking to the group," Gill said. "I want to get close to them and let them get close to me, just sharing ideas. I think that's what's important."

Gill's calm and personable demeanor is evident from the second he begins to speak. With a warm smile and friendly attitude, Gill is easy to talk to and willing to talk about himself, his faith, his family and the football team he now has under his wing.

"I am a man of God, a child of God," Gill said when asked to describe himself. "That's where I get my strength from, that's where I get my direction from. I don't force that on anybody because everybody has their own beliefs and I respect that."

Come the start of football season, many fans will be interested in the strength and direction Gill has managed to gain from his close relationship to Tom Osborne. While Gill was quarterback from 1983-84, and then for the first five years of Gill's 13-season tenure as assistant coach, Osborne was both a mentor and a friend as the head coach of Nebraska.

"I still keep in communication with him," Gill said. "He helped direct me in a way that I believe to go because he has taught me a lot about life. Along with my dad and my mom, those are three people that have taught me great things about life, how to deal with the adversity and just daily life skills."

Gill hopes to instill a competitive attitude in his student-athletes, a skill that they can use both on the field and in the academic setting.

"All I want the guys to do is compete, compete, compete," Gill said. "I'm talking about even competing today in the weight room, competing today when they're doing some running. That's what I want to see out of them."

From what he has learned about the team through word of mouth or videotapes, Gill feels that the members of the team need to learn to work with each other.

"I don't know the insides of it, but from a football aspect and talking to certain people, improvement needs to happen to their chemistry," Gill said. "They need to believe that they can trust the guy beside them and that's part of the process of believing that they can win. We need to build great chemistry with this team and show them the process of going about doing that."

Last season's 1-10 football team struggled on special teams, a problem that Gill will need to remedy before the Bulls can resemble a competitive Mid-American Conference team.

"We have to find the right people that have a hunger to play special teams," Gill said. "Special teams is really about a passion and a heart. Yeah, you have to have the talent and the size and all that, but it's within."

As a former quarterback, Buffalo's newest coach knows what he wants out of his offense and the style of play fans will see on the field next year.

"We're going to use the West Coast offense," Gill said. "We're going to run some option. We are going to do what we need to do to move the football."

Other than some fine-tuning for the Bulls, the playbook is complete and it's something Gill has been compiling throughout his career.

"I will probably have some plays from Nebraska, but terminology wise, it will be from the West Coast terms," Gill said. "Everybody runs the same plays. You just call them something different. I am not going to sit here and try to paint something that's not there."

Bulls fans would hope that he will be able to paint his winning smile on the team's record.