LAS CRUCES, N.M. (KRQE) – After a bowl game victory in his first year as NMSU’s head football coach, the Aggies’ Jerry Kill is now making a splash with his first ever tattoo. Tweeting Sunday, “A promise is a promise Aggie Nation!” Kill, 61, dedicated his right bicep to the team’s signature dueling pistols and a message: “NMSU 2022 Bowl Champs.”
The Aggies (7-6 in 2022) won the Quick Lane Bowl in Detroit back in December, defeating Bowling Green 24 to 19. Kill made the tattoo promise to the team leading up to the game, hoping to inspire the student-athletes.
“They were kind of dragging just a little bit, and I said, ‘OK’ and I called them all up and said, ‘Here’s the deal. You win this bowl game, I respect this team so much and what you’ve done, I’ll get a tattoo on my arm,’ and they all just went crazy,” Kill told KTSM-TV Sunday.
Inked inside “Tat Reapers Tattoo Studio” in Las Cruces, Kill’s tattoo took about three hours to complete. Even before the tattoo, Kill said in December that he’d remember the 2022 Aggies team, applauding it for getting “every ounce out of the talent they have.” Now, Kill has another reminder.
“It’s honoring a group of young men that did some things that probably no [one]… well, including their head coach, didn’t think they could do it,” Kill told KTSM. “Believe me, I wouldn’t have made the bet if I didn’t think it was special.”
Coach Kill tweeted out of a photo of the finished ink Sunday. The design is colorized with some traditional New Mexico red and yellow and what looks like a splash of turquoise.
Kill signed a six-year contract as head coach of the Aggies in December, just before the Quick Lane Bowl. His newer stint with the Aggies comes after an abrupt retirement in 2015, when health problems lead Kill to retire from the University of Minnesota. Kill ranks as the eighth-winningest active FBS head coach, according to a December news release from the Aggies.
