Illinois has a long history of hiring button down white shirt guys who look great in a navy blue blazer and tan slacks with cordovan loafers. You then lease him a Cadillac or Lincoln from one of the dealers on Neil and you send him off with a Shell gas card to all the country clubs within 150 miles of CU, selling the prestige of the UI to everyone in the room , 99% of whom had a family member graduate. Those people eat that stuff up.
Lovie fits that role, even though he is black. Everyone knows we were the last B10 school to not have had a black major sport head coach and there was NO CHANCE AT ALL we were going to not hire a black guy this time. We had too. Whitman needed a known commodity.
Bill Self is really the lone hire you could maybe claim was a little outside the box, but Bill is/was still an Okie at heart, albeit with a strange ability to relate to the urban player. To me, while Mike White had a stain on his record, it was no worse than the tarnish everyone in the country club also carried around with them.
PJ Fleck is way outside those lines.
To me, the biggest outside the box hire we had in the last 30 years was Mike Thomas