Turner Hillery Gill (born August 13, 1962) is an American college athletic administrator and former football player and coach.

He was one of 11 black head coaches in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision at the time of his hiring at Kansas.

[1] Gill graduated from Arlington Heights High School in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was an all-state, all-county and all-district quarterback for Coach Merlin Priddy.

Gill arrived on campus in 1980 and saw limited action in mop-up duty as a freshman, which at the time was still relatively unusual, as freshmen had only been recently allowed under NCAA rules to participate at the varsity level.

Gill had found himself third on the depth chart prior to the Huskers season opener, behind Mark Mauer and Nate Mason.

Behind Gill, the Huskers demolished Colorado 59–0, thus setting off an unbeaten run through the Big 8 conference, which Nebraska would win outright for the first time since 1971.

During the season's penultimate game against Iowa State, however, Gill suffered what initially appeared to be an innocuous leg injury.

Gill came back strong during 1982 and led the Huskers to a second consecutive outright Big 8 title and a 12–1 record overall, losing only a controversial game at eventual national champion Penn State in September.

During his senior season, Turner would call the signals for one of the most prolific offenses in college football history, averaging 52 points and 401 rushing yards per game.

The Huskers came within a whisker of a national championship, falling to the University of Miami, just one point short following a failed two-point conversion attempt in the 1984 Orange Bowl.

Overall, Gill finished with a 28–2 record in his three years as a starter, winning three consecutive outright Big Eight championships with a perfect 20–0 mark in conference play.

Gill, undrafted by the NFL, went on to sign a lucrative contract with the Canadian Football League's Montreal Concordes.

Gill was just beginning to reach his potential as a professional player when he suffered three concussions, two of them coming in back-to-back games against the BC Lions and Saskatchewan Roughriders.

Although he managed to keep the starting job until September, post-concussion issues prompted him to undergo a large battery of neurological tests during the 1985–86 offseason.

On May 21, 1986—two days after the start of training camp—doctors informed the renamed Alouettes that Gill's post-concussion problems were serious enough that he would never be medically cleared to play football again, ending his career at the age of 23.

The Buffalo Bulls had gone 8–49 under previous coach Jim Hofher, and was considered "one of the three or four worst FBS programs in the nation when [Gill] took over.

[4] Because of the great turnaround that Gill orchestrated in only his second season at Buffalo, he was one of two leading candidates to replace Bill Callahan as head coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

Gill interviewed at Syracuse University, but was passed over for Doug Marrone, later the head coach for the NFL's Buffalo Bills.

On December 3, Gill announced his retirement from coaching to spend more time with his wife Gayle, who was diagnosed with a heart condition in 2016.