To the point of Bielema being a known jerk and alleged up to and including a genuinely morally unfit character, I guess I place my trust in Whitman's hands who will be working with a lot more information and understanding of the profession's standards than I will. It's reason for pause, no doubt.
To the point of how we can look at Bielema's prior stops for guidance on whether or not he would succeed at Illinois, I am reminded of what I in the moment thought was the dumbest hire of the last few years, Mack Brown at UNC. What we didn't know however, was that Mack Brown had given a lot of thought to what his strengths and weaknesses were, what the needs of the present day college football program are, and made a plan for how we would succeed at THAT job.
It still might not have worked, and I remain skeptical of the Mack Brown/Herm Edwards explicit CEO coordinator-driven model. But the results speak for themselves, and it's clear that UNC's anointing of Brown was not just "hey, it wasn't really his fault at Texas if you parse the numbers enough", but an affirmative case made by Brown of what he can do NOW in THAT job.
I hope that's the bar Bielema would have to clear with Whitman. I've said this before, but the Lovie Smith era at Illinois was conceived in a series of private meetings at Lovie's Tampa home between two guys who really believed they knew football, but who hadn't been day-to-day with a major college program since 2000 (Whitman) and 1995 (Lovie) respectively. I hope that lessons have been learned now that Whitman has some battle scars in the job.