Illinois Fires Coach Bill Cubit Less Than Four Months After Hiring Him, LINK!

[CaptainSidneyReilly]

Wow, first day on job, Illinois A.D. fires Cubit. Rumors are Tampa Bay Buc's Fired Coach Lovie Smith will become New Head Coach, just days before Spring Ball? Franklin will be playing Illinois in the future as well.

LINK:
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefoo...-cubit-less-than-four-months-after-hiring-him

Early Possible Candidates Links:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sport...coach-candidates-spt-0306-20160305-story.html

http://247sports.com/Bolt/Possible-candidates-to-become-next-Illinois-coach-44096039

 

[RINGGOLD94]

Love Smith

 

[thebadby2]

Wow, first day on job, Illinois A.D. fires Cubit. Rumors are Tampa Bay Buc's Fired Coach Lovie Smith will become New Head Coach, just days before Spring Ball? Franklin will be playing Illinois in the future as well.

LINK:
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefoo...-cubit-less-than-four-months-after-hiring-him

Early Possible Candidates Links:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sport...coach-candidates-spt-0306-20160305-story.html

http://247sports.com/Bolt/Possible-candidates-to-become-next-Illinois-coach-44096039

One of the true dead end jobs in all of college football. They did Cubit a favor.

 

[MajorMajors]

Wow, first day on job, Illinois A.D. fires Cubit. Rumors are Tampa Bay Buc's Fired Coach Lovie Smith will become New Head Coach, just days before Spring Ball? Franklin will be playing Illinois in the future as well.

LINK:
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefoo...-cubit-less-than-four-months-after-hiring-him

Early Possible Candidates Links:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sport...coach-candidates-spt-0306-20160305-story.html

http://247sports.com/Bolt/Possible-candidates-to-become-next-Illinois-coach-44096039

After watching about a quarter of one of their games last year, I can see why Illinois fired their coach... A good coach could eventually make some noise in that Division of the big 14.

 

[HailtoPitt]

Why would Lovie Smith go there? That AD is a moron.

Edit: Looks like Lovie Smith is actually going there. Illinois got a career .500 coach who was 8-24 at Tampa Bay. Spoiler Alert for them.

 

[Hailpitt]

One of the commentators leaked that Franklin made an inquiry, but was advised that Lovie was already tied into the job

 

[MrGee]

Better yet, why would an

Why would Lovie Smith go there? That AD is a moron.

Edit: Looks like Lovie Smith is actually going there. Illinois got a career .500 coach who was 8-24 at Tampa Bay. Spoiler Alert for them.

Why would anyone hire Lovie Smith?

 

[HailtoPitt]

Better yet, why would an

Why would anyone hire Lovie Smith?

Because mediocre NFL coach = big success in college football!

 

[CaptainSidneyReilly]

In answering some comments made by Posts above.
Excerpts & Link:

Can Lovie Smith be savior of Illinois football? BTN analyst Howard Griffith believes he can be:..................
1. Can a career NFL guy recruit?.................
This was the argument, remember, against Mike Munchak as a Penn State candidate. Smith has made his name as a pro assistant, most notably as the developer of the "Tampa 2" defense under Tony Dungy, then under Mike Martz with a very good but largely forgotten defense with the St. Louis Rams.
But it's erroneous to say he has no recruiting experience. Smith began his career with 13 seasons as a college defensive assistant, all of it at FBS programs, the last 9 at major-conference programs: Wisconsin, Arizona State, Kentucky, Tennessee (under Phillip Fulmer) and Ohio State (under John Cooper). He recruited plenty.
"When Lovie comes into the living room, he's gonna have a lot of credibility," Big Ten Network analyst and former 11-year NFL fullback Howard Griffith told me by phone on Tuesday. "Now, he has to put a staff around him that can get him to that point where he's in the living room able to close."............

2. Is Illinois too far gone to fix at this point?
That's a legit question. It's not just about the won-lost results. It's about the decline in the brand and the downturn in recruiting that's been so abrupt you wonder if it can be rescued.
According to Portland, Ore.-based recruiting expert Dave Bartoo of College Football Matrix (cfbmatrix.com), he's never seen anything quite like the nosedive that Illinois football has taken on the recruiting front since the final days of the Ron Zook regime in 2011. It's been a death spiral into the nether reaches known only by Purdue and Minnesota in the Big Ten.
"It is very rare for a program to fall that far, that fast, as Illinois has, and then stay down there," said Bartoo on Tuesday. "You can't even quantify how absolutely terribly their recruiting has fallen over the last few years. It's as harsh as it gets."
Bartoo aggregates rankings from the four major services (Scout, Rivals, 24/7 and ESPN) into one average. He explained that Illinois' rolling-four-year-average national ranking had always fluctuated somewhere between 20th (during the peak of the Ron Zook years in the late '00s) to 50th (during the dog days of the Ron Turner years in the early to mid- '00s).
But in the last five years, Illinois has twice had its individual classes ranked in the 70s and the 2015 class ranks a composite 65th, down with the MAC and Sun Belt and WAC outposts.
"The only program you can really compare it to [in precipitous decline] is Colorado," said Bartoo.
Need we say more? That's a deep ditch for anyone to dig from. No matter how charming he is, Smith has his work cut out................

3. Is a defensive specialist the right fit?
In Illinois' circumstance, it might be the quickest way to respectability.
Offenses take time to organize and scheme. You need a competent line, which always takes a while to construct. You need to recruit a quarterback who fits your philosophy. It's a long-term proposition.
Defense is quicker to build from scratch – and scratch is certainly where the Illini are. If you can recruit athletes in the different layers, you can basically cut them loose and order them to seek and destroy. There's not as much thought involved. It's all about speed, power, endurance and desire. Those things you can construct relatively quickly.
Smith is the perfect man to make that happen – if he and his staff can recruit those athletes.

4. Can Smith get the fan base excited again?
Only wins will do that, no matter the venue. But it's also a little more complicated at Illinois.
Griffith grew up in Chicago and played his college ball at Illinois. He believes his alma mater has finally gotten serious about football with this hire after the horrific Tim Beckman regime and the sudden dismissal on Saturday of former interim coach Bill Cubit by new athletic director Josh Whitman.
"When you go back and study it, the problem is stability," Griffith said on Tuesday. "Honestly, it's nothing more than that."
Will Smith, 57, be any different than the others, even Griffith's old coach John Mackovic, who saw an opportunity to jump to Texas after a flash of success and leaped? That's what the fans need to see as much as recruits and players already in the fold – commitment and continuity.
What's all this mean to the fans? Griffith believes it's hope where there'd been none:
"You talk about fever pitch, it might be even higher than that. It had gotten to the point where the fan base didn't care. Every time they looked around something bad was happening to Illinois football and Illinois athletics.
"In the first 45 minutes of [Smith's] press conference, they sold 1,400 season tickets. Now, that's not gonna get it done. But to understand the excitement, you also have to understand just how far down this fan base had gotten with Illinois football."
Certainly, the only way to go is up. How far up a 57-year-old NFL veteran can take them is yet to be seen.
LINK:
http://www.pennlive.com/pennstatefo...ith_illinois_fighting.html#incart_river_index