Unfortunately this is reminding me of the Beckman hire where we had all these high profile potential assistants bantied about including Matt Campbell as OC and we ended up with a very pedestrian staff
Completely false revisionist history.
You look back at 2012 and look what has happened in the coaches careers since and that initial Beckman staff was an absolute grand slam.
Billy Gonzales is the Passing Game Coordinator at Florida
Chris Beatty is the WR coach at Pitt after being the AHC/Co-OC at Maryland
Tim Banks is the Co-DC at Penn State
Alex Golesh is the Co-OC at UCF after being the RC at Iowa State that built that whole team
Aaron Hillmann is Campbell's head Strength Coach at Iowa State
And that's not just hindsight, these guys were big gets at the time, especially Gonzales.
As a collective it is definitely true that you had a lot more recruiting ability than coaching ability in that group, a totally fair criticism, and none of them being outright playcallers despite their high market values reflects that. But the problem was Beckman, who in 2012 was completely unprepared and in over his head as the CEO of a Big Ten football program. That's a deficiency even Campbell would have had a hard time masking, having a boss and manager who didn't know what he was doing.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't so much that he brought in bad assistants, as much as it was him having to bring in guys he had never worked with and guys that weren't experienced at actually calling plays as co-OCs. His staff wasn't terrible, just kinda patchwork and weirdly set up. Most of his staff had pretty good experience and were well regarded.
Ha, you were nicer about it than I was.
You see in this false narrative the way the Guentherite Myth works. It cannot be that Beckman and Illinois had the resources and the clout to hire a solid staff in 2012, because the central fact has to always be that NO ONE, ANYWHERE, EVER would work for Mike Thomas or have anything to do with a Mike Thomas athletic department, and it has to be that Matt Campbell laughed his butt off at the mere suggestion of ever being involved with Mike Thomas' Illinois.
Thankfully we now have an AD that synthesizes the virtues of Guenther (credibility with and control over the elite coterie of donors) and Thomas (actually attempting to run a modern-day athletic department), while having the critical extra piece that both of them lacked (the ability to scout and recruit big time revenue sport coaches). This is an argument about the mists of history, but the propaganda campaign still drives me insane.
