Nonsense. The program when Lovie took over wasn't spiraling. It was a normal Illinois program. They finished 5-7 the year before he got here. With alot of starters coming back. It was a stable yet very mediocre program. There was nothing that needed to be "stabilized" because the prior coaching staff/regime had been here 5 years with middling results. Give Bill Cubit the same contract that Lovie got, give him 5 years and we aren't any worse off except probably a bit better financially because Cubit wouldn't have commanded the same salary. And the entire trope about "no one good will ever take an Illinois job", well Lovie Smith proved that if you throw enough money at someone, they'll come. There's plenty of other coaches, other than Lovie Smith, that would have gladly taken an Illinois job given the salary. The Illinois job is one of the most cushiest in college sports. The fans/boosters have literally no expectations, and you get paid a ton of money, and you get into a state pension system that will also give you a ton of money. So there's very little negatives about the job. It's highly paid, and low stress compared to nearly every other college football job.
And I don't think Lovie Smith provided any "legitimacy". What is legitimate about taking a guy from the pros, that has never been a head coach at the college level, and then having him hire one of the worst lowest qualified staffs in football. What exactly is legitimate about that? That was amateur hour.
Lovie didn't upgrade any facilities. Josh Whitman and his donors did that. And given the amount of money that Whitman spent on hockey, I'm pretty sure he'd have made sure the football facilities were done regardless of who the head coach was. Unless you can find the donors that explicitly said they were only donating because Lovie Smith was hired, then this is again nonsense.
We don't need to make excuses for Lovie. He sucked. It was a bad hire on day one, it was a bad hire the day he was fired. It was taking a shot on something out of the box, that failed miserably. That set us back years.