Well let's at least look at the situation in context a little bit.
Lovie chose to run off the players he inherited in favor of playing raw, unprepared freshmen. I think the claims made here about the talent of those players are laughable nonsense and that choosing to run them off was a gigantic mistake. But there's no use crying over spilled milk, that's what he did, what's done is done.
The reason other schools can rebuild in 2 or 3 years is because they get buy-in from the players they inherited and with their coaching acumen and player development ability they mold those guys into solid contributors and leaders, supplemented by a sprinkling of the best of their own hand picked recruits. That's how they do it in that amount of time. And they all do it, that is the story of every successful rebuild, and claims to the contrary are falsehoods.
We ran those players off, so we did not have that opportunity. No coach could have won with the lineups we chose to field in 2017. As for this season, we should have been better than we were, but we still badly lacked that veteran leadership that Lovie made the affirmative choice to jettison. We chose to construct the roster in a way that would push competitiveness down the road a couple of years, in lieu of trying to be respectable in the meantime.
The good news is, that story is now the past. Illinois is a veteran football team now, an extremely experienced one. We have more than enough to be a 6-7 win team next year, I honestly think we probably will be.
And if we're not, it's about as easy and thoroughly researched and proven of a decision as an AD will ever make. If we're not good next year, Lovie is not the answer, that's all she wrote.