So much of the chatter in this stuff is looking backwards and digging into the past of the coaches. And there is much to admire about Leipold in that regard.
But the trick is projecting into the future, of that coach in our job with the particularities of it and how a plan is going to work. And it just wasn't adding up to me. I am glad we didn't go in that direction, and I wouldn't have said that two weeks ago. The more I researched and thought about it, the less sense it made.
I'd have hired Monken. I thought Dave Clawson made a lot of sense too, if he was in fact available. I thought Jim Leonhard made a lot of sense, if he was in fact available. All of those guys would have been higher on my list, probably.
I think the case for Bielema is that, when you think about our brand new $80 million football facility, and the industry leading nooks and crannies of that, it was obvious that, as big of a name that Lovie Smith is, the slapdash crony operation he was running did not scale to that as a resource. Bielema is going to step in on day one able to operate that resource to its fullest potential. There is no learning curve in the actual day-to-day program oversight at a well-resourced 2020 Big Ten football program. That is appealing.
