Poll: Is it time to fire Lovie?

Is it time to fire Lovie?

  • Yes

    Votes: 101 43.7%
  • No

    Votes: 13 5.6%
  • Finish the season

    Votes: 116 50.2%
  • Other response

    Votes: 1 0.4%

  • Total voters
    231
  • Poll closed .
Status
Not open for further replies.
#26      

Retro62

North Bethesda, Maryland
End of the season. Even though Lovie is clearly out of his element, in the world of football he is still a very respected man, and it may not look good for us, regardless of how poorly he’s done. I hope he just agrees to “retire” at the end of the season.
 
#27      
Why wait....I honestly dont see another W in the schedule....Not sure what the point is in keeping " DEAD MAN WALKING" around...be aggressive..make a package deal with Nancy Fahey ( 2-32)??
 
#28      
Whitman has to have short list ready, but wow are his hands tied. I applaud him for the risk he took. I remember thinking Josh was a stud the day Lovie was hired, but it was really just a huge gamble. Unfortunately the dice ended up as snake eyes. I wish Lovie would do the honorable thing and quit. Wouldn't that be a blessing! I hate that my son, who is a sophomore at Illinois, is having such a terrible fall experience. I wish he could have a 1989 year like I did. Bring on Basketball!
Remind why we paid 5 million dollars a year to a guy with no college experience, and now we know, no plan ? We should’ve let this thing play out and kept Cubit (at 1/5 the price and better results ) after Beckman was fired, for a year to see how it went.Who knows how it goes but there is no way anyone can say it would’ve been worse (on top of that Lovie biggest offensive weapon on his current team, Epstein, was a Cubit commit.)

If you remember we were very competitive in all the games, barring maybe two. We were a Georgia State loss to Georgia Southern from going bowling and were coming back with Lunt and Vaughn. Lovie screwed that up by running off Vaughn (Check him out at the end of the year when he walks away with a Super Bowl ring as a contributor) and screwing up Lunt Not only has Lovie destroyed the team physically, but financially puts a great hit at $5 million a year. Which is about $1 million a win, actually more per win. Great investment!!!!!
 
#29      

IlliniReb

Dallas-Fort Worth
Have to
Why wait....I honestly dont see another W in the schedule....Not sure what the point is in keeping " DEAD MAN WALKING" around...be aggressive..make a package deal with Nancy Fahey ( 2-32)??
Have to wait. Your HC and DC are Lovie.
Rod as the HC isn’t an upgrade and who will be DC?
 
#32      
I guess all we can hope for is that there are enough rich alumni who are mad enough to come up with the $2M buyout for Lovie, plus however much more for the assistants.
This falls on Whitman 5 wasted years and a boatload of money. Stupid. Whitman always knows it all and has nothing to back it up. The guy in the boardroom who thinks he knows it all is usually the stupidest.
Got lucky in basketball because of the schools history as well as the hc noting that this was his dream job
 
#33      
From my point of view I would wait to fire him till the end of the year. You fire him now and other schools start the process of poaching our roster and coaches. You will still have other schools do that either way, but if Whitman does it right it will minimize the damage.
I dunno. The list of players that any other P5 program would want is pretty short and I doubt that there will be a lot of interest in Miles or most of the other staff.
 
#34      
Well~ I had to chuckle many times in the past on this forum when it was consistently stated that Josh is the smartest man in the room. I think it’s been exposed that he’s a regular guy doing a hard job and what he does with Lovie and his replacement will tell if he’s qualified to be a big 10 athletic director. The fans deserve better than this product.
 
#35      
Well~ I had to chuckle many times in the past on this forum when it was consistently stated that Josh is the smartest man in the room. I think it’s been exposed that he’s a regular guy doing a hard job and what he does with Lovie and his replacement will tell if he’s qualified to be a big 10 athletic director. The fans deserve better than this product.
Agreed. We brought in a D3 AD who has no Big 10 AD respect. Then he fired an adequate (at the time ) hc with a $1 million contract expiring in a year and gave a $25 million long term contract to a guy with no college experience, who no one else was clamoring for on his first day. (In addition I’ll never forgive Lovie for running off Vaughn either )

Imo Whitman was exposed right there The results only confirm it.
 
#36      
This falls on Whitman 5 wasted years and a boatload of money. Stupid. Whitman always knows it all and has nothing to back it up. The guy in the boardroom who thinks he knows it all is usually the stupidest.
Got lucky in basketball because of the schools history as well as the hc noting that this was his dream job
Lovie was an out-of-the-box, near universal hit when he was hired by Whitman. Lovie hasn't panned out but hiring Lovie, at the time, was not stupid. Watching Whitman over the last 5 years I have never seen a public incident where it appeared Josh presented himself as the smartest person in the room. On the contrary, Whitman seems a modest, intelligent, compassionate man...neither stupid nor lucky...who wants to see Illinois win as much as anyone.
 
#37      

Deleted member 747660

D
Guest
I think I would wait till the end of the year strictly bc I do not want Rod as the interm.

Also, can't wait to start the coaching candidate polls when he is gone.
I'll start the coaching candidate talk right now......Hugh Friese.
 
#38      
Lovie was an out-of-the-box, near universal hit when he was hired by Whitman. Lovie hasn't panned out but hiring Lovie, at the time, was not stupid. Watching Whitman over the last 5 years I have never seen a public incident where it appeared Josh presented himself as the smartest person in the room. On the contrary, Whitman seems a modest, intelligent, compassionate man...neither stupid nor lucky...who wants to see Illinois win as much as anyone.
I don’t deny he’s passionate but there’s more to the job then passion. Hiring an unwanted pro HC for a college job is not bright. Lovie would’ve been available as would’ve many others if Cubit would’ve failed or even not generated great excitement. Now we have over $25 million dumped into a dumpster fire. Had he waited we could’ve got Fleck the following year after Cubits contract expired. Do you really believe Lovies year 5 team beats that initial Cubit team he took over a week before the season ? Let Cubit finish that year and reevaluate with tons of more options more desirable then Smith, who’s turned out nothing less then a complete failure at the cost of over a million dollars a win.

That falls on Whitman with his D3 experience and trying to make an overcompensating big splash that was not rationally thought out and we will pay it for longer then we should’ve
 
#39      
I don’t deny he’s passionate but there’s more to the job then passion. Hiring an unwanted pro HC for a college job is not bright. Lovie would’ve been available as would’ve many others if Cubit would’ve failed or even not generated great excitement. Now we have over $25 million dumped into a dumpster fire. Had he waited we could’ve got Fleck the following year after Cubits contract expired. Do you really believe Lovies year 5 team beats that initial Cubit team he took over a week before the season ? Let Cubit finish that year and reevaluate with tons of more options more desirable then Smith, who’s turned out nothing less then a complete failure at the cost of over a million dollars a win.

That falls on Whitman with his D3 experience and trying to make an overcompensating big splash that was not rationally thought out and we will pay it for longer then we should’ve
Underwood appears to be a slam dunk hire, and lets be honest, we are a basketball school at heart.
 
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#41      
This falls on Whitman 5 wasted years and a boatload of money. Stupid. Whitman always knows it all and has nothing to back it up. The guy in the boardroom who thinks he knows it all is usually the stupidest.
Got lucky in basketball because of the schools history as well as the hc noting that this was his dream job
Agreed. We brought in a D3 AD who has no Big 10 AD respect. Then he fired an adequate (at the time ) hc with a $1 million contract expiring in a year and gave a $25 million long term contract to a guy with no college experience, who no one else was clamoring for on his first day. (In addition I’ll never forgive Lovie for running off Vaughn either )

Imo Whitman was exposed right there The results only confirm it.
I don’t deny he’s passionate but there’s more to the job then passion. Hiring an unwanted pro HC for a college job is not bright. Lovie would’ve been available as would’ve many others if Cubit would’ve failed or even not generated great excitement. Now we have over $25 million dumped into a dumpster fire. Had he waited we could’ve got Fleck the following year after Cubits contract expired. Do you really believe Lovies year 5 team beats that initial Cubit team he took over a week before the season ? Let Cubit finish that year and reevaluate with tons of more options more desirable then Smith, who’s turned out nothing less then a complete failure at the cost of over a million dollars a win.

That falls on Whitman with his D3 experience and trying to make an overcompensating big splash that was not rationally thought out and we will pay it for longer then we should’ve

How can you argue with context-free analysis. "With 20/20 hindsight Whitman should have waited a year and hired Fleck instead of some pro football retread because that would have turned out awesome. Because things weren't done back then how I say now, five years after-the-fact, the athletic director is stupid and a failure and nobody respects him." Nailed it.

Except, if you actually watched this program during the previous decade, you might recall where things stood back in February 2016. Lovie Smith was hired, when he was hired, for a number of reasons. One reason was to re-establish some degree of credibility for a program that was perceived as a clown show and toxic cesspool after the Beckman fiasco and Thomas firing and the nationwide punchline that was the one-year Cubit contract. Smith was hired to fix a broken and unprofessional football culture. He was hired to counteract the widely held belief amongst fans and the press that Illinois was a lazy, complacent program that wouldn't even attempt a risky splash hire or pay competitive top-end power-5 salaries. He was hired to provide some long-term stability so that the athletic department could address other problems--like our league-worst facilities, for example--rather than constantly cycle through coaches and burn buyout money. He was hired to bring some positive media attention to a program that desperately needed it.

Obviously, the experiment failed in many respects. The recruiting bump we all expected never materialized. Lovie's first batch of coordinators and assistants were a disaster. He was even more out of touch with college game than we feared and didn't bring in the right people to remedy that. His replacement assistants, for the most part, have not been B1G caliber, and naming himself defensive coordinator and hiring his son were prideful and self-interested mistakes. It doesn't seem like he has been willing to put in the work that's required to run a power-5 program. The on-the-field product has been abysmal. I don't think any of this is disputed. We all have eyes. But let's go back to those objectives from February 2016. How much of that was accomplished? How better positioned are we now to attract our next coach than we were in 2016? The answers to these questions are a better measure of who was stupid and who was smart.
 
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#42      
This falls on Whitman 5 wasted years and a boatload of money. Stupid. Whitman always knows it all and has nothing to back it up. The guy in the boardroom who thinks he knows it all is usually the stupidest.
Got lucky in basketball because of the schools history as well as the hc noting that this was his dream job
You can't have it both ways. If he was lucky with Underwood, then he was unlucky with Smith.
 
#43      
How can you argue with context-free analysis. "With 20/20 hindsight Whitman should have waited a year and hired Fleck instead of some pro football retread because that would have turned out awesome. Because things weren't done back then how I say now, five years after-the-fact, the athletic director is stupid and a failure and nobody respects him." Nailed it.

Except, if you actually watched this program during the previous decade, you might recall where things stood back in February 2016. Lovie Smith was hired, when he was hired, for a number of reasons. One reason was to re-establish some degree of credibility for a program that was perceived as a clown show and toxic cesspool after the Beckman fiasco and Thomas firing and the nationwide punchline that was the one-year Cubit contract. Smith was hired to fix a broken and unprofessional football culture. He was hired to counteract the widely held belief amongst fans and the press that Illinois was a lazy, complacent program that wouldn't even attempt a risky splash hire or pay competitive top-end power-5 salaries. He was hired to provide some long-term stability so that the athletic department could address other problems--like our league-worst facilities, for example--rather than constantly cycle through coaches and burn buyout money. He was hired to bring some positive media attention to a program that desperately needed it.

Obviously, the experiment failed in many respects. The recruiting bump we all expected never materialized. Lovie's first batch of coordinators and assistants were a disaster. He was even more out of touch with college game than we feared and didn't bring in the right people to remedy that. His replacement assistants, for the most part, have not been B1G caliber, and naming himself defensive coordinator and hiring his son were prideful and self-interested mistakes. It doesn't seem like he has been willing to put in the work that's required to run a power-5 program. The on-the-field product has been abysmal. I don't think any of this is disputed. We all have eyes. But let's go back to those objectives from February 2016. How much of that was accomplished? How better positioned are we now to attract our next coach than we were in 2016? The answers to these questions are a better measure of who was stupid and who was smart.

Incredible post, absolutely nailed it.


You can't have it both ways. If he was lucky with Underwood, then he was unlucky with Smith.

Yup. How ridiculous to assert stupidity for the Lovie hire with five years of hindsight and then brush off the incredible hire of Underwood as “dumb luck.”
 
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#44      
I acknowledge and don’t disagree entirely. You ask “how are we better position from 2016 ?” Is there any doubt we are no better and may be worse but with a paid $25,000,000 bill and nothing to show for it. I’m no real fan of Beckman and although Cubit was a big upgrade he was not assured to be the answer either. But why gamble with a first day hire costing us $ 25 million without navigating through the landscape and educating yourself of your needs My position was to keep Cubit for the first of the two year contract and look for potential coaches that are aligned with what we want to do. If Cubit was a disaster in his interim year which I thought he was competitive after taking over in the first week this would be moot. UI hired an AD who was inexperienced and he rushed a hire for a splash not for what was good for the program. That’s my point. We would’ve had many more options then we had firing a few weeks before spring training. And to make Lovie a top 10 salaried coach with no college experience was insane no matter how desperate we were.
 
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#45      
But why gamble with a first day hire costing us $ 25 million without navigating through the landscape and educating yourself of your needs My position was to keep Cubit for the first of the two year contract and look for potential coaches that are aligned with what we want to do.
What were our needs and what did we want to do?
 
#46      
What were our needs and what did we want to do?
I recall we wanted stability after the whole Beckman fiasco in reality.Later, Whitman came in guaranteeing championships which was nice but not realistic. I don’t think anybody thought that would occur not even Whitman

What was needed was stability with a plan to move forward Not a splash hire to grab a headline with no future agenda which has led to a costly failure. Unfortunately we need to be Purdue first and then continue to climb the ladder. In 2015 we beat Purdue like a drum and competed with everybody but Ohio State, who is what we ultimately want to be and we laid an egg at PSU.No doubt we are worse off now but after these costly five years hopefully we have a plan other then unlike in 2016 where Whitman wanted to make a headline
 
#47      
This falls on Whitman 5 wasted years and a boatload of money. Stupid. Whitman always knows it all and has nothing to back it up. The guy in the boardroom who thinks he knows it all is usually the stupidest.
Got lucky in basketball because of the schools history as well as the hc noting that this was his dream job
You can’t pick and choose. Saying the bad hire was a lack of skill but the good hire was luck. Sounds to me like maybe you had a bad interaction with him or something.
 
#48      
I don’t deny he’s passionate but there’s more to the job then passion. Hiring an unwanted pro HC for a college job is not bright. Lovie would’ve been available as would’ve many others if Cubit would’ve failed or even not generated great excitement. Now we have over $25 million dumped into a dumpster fire. Had he waited we could’ve got Fleck the following year after Cubits contract expired. Do you really believe Lovies year 5 team beats that initial Cubit team he took over a week before the season ? Let Cubit finish that year and reevaluate with tons of more options more desirable then Smith, who’s turned out nothing less then a complete failure at the cost of over a million dollars a win.

That falls on Whitman with his D3 experience and trying to make an overcompensating big splash that was not rationally thought out and we will pay it for longer then we should’ve
Revisionist history. Fleck wouldn’t have touched this job at that time
 
#49      
How can you argue with context-free analysis. "With 20/20 hindsight Whitman should have waited a year and hired Fleck instead of some pro football retread because that would have turned out awesome. Because things weren't done back then how I say now, five years after-the-fact, the athletic director is stupid and a failure and nobody respects him." Nailed it.

Except, if you actually watched this program during the previous decade, you might recall where things stood back in February 2016. Lovie Smith was hired, when he was hired, for a number of reasons. One reason was to re-establish some degree of credibility for a program that was perceived as a clown show and toxic cesspool after the Beckman fiasco and Thomas firing and the nationwide punchline that was the one-year Cubit contract. Smith was hired to fix a broken and unprofessional football culture. He was hired to counteract the widely held belief amongst fans and the press that Illinois was a lazy, complacent program that wouldn't even attempt a risky splash hire or pay competitive top-end power-5 salaries. He was hired to provide some long-term stability so that the athletic department could address other problems--like our league-worst facilities, for example--rather than constantly cycle through coaches and burn buyout money. He was hired to bring some positive media attention to a program that desperately needed it.

Obviously, the experiment failed in many respects. The recruiting bump we all expected never materialized. Lovie's first batch of coordinators and assistants were a disaster. He was even more out of touch with college game than we feared and didn't bring in the right people to remedy that. His replacement assistants, for the most part, have not been B1G caliber, and naming himself defensive coordinator and hiring his son were prideful and self-interested mistakes. It doesn't seem like he has been willing to put in the work that's required to run a power-5 program. The on-the-field product has been abysmal. I don't think any of this is disputed. We all have eyes. But let's go back to those objectives from February 2016. How much of that was accomplished? How better positioned are we now to attract our next coach than we were in 2016? The answers to these questions are a better measure of who was stupid and who was smart.
Absolutely nailed it
 
#50      
You can’t pick and choose. Saying the bad hire was a lack of skill but the good hire was luck. Sounds to me like maybe you had a bad interaction with him or something.
Never met him just a fan. I’m sure he’s passionate and means well. Sorry for criticizing his handling of this situation
Revisionist history. Fleck wouldn’t have touched this job at that time
 
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