Welcome to the day after the day after in the frightening land of Illini football.
Hours after he was fired Friday morning, former coach Tim Beckman bolted town and drove to Avon Lake, Ohio, where he watched his son, Alex, play football. Along the way he found time to craft a statement making it clear he intends to sue to get some of the separation money athletics director Mike Thomas says he’s not entitled to.
“I will vigorously defend both my reputation and my legal rights,” Beckman said.
At some schools that might qualify as major drama. At Illinois, it’s another day at the office.
Coaching wish lists are already popping up and soon names like P.J. Fleck of Western Michigan, Dino Babers at Bowling Green and even Brock Spack at Illinois State will become more familiar.
No doubt some of those candidates will consider the mess at Illinois and wonder if what former Illini head coach Ron Zook said is true.
Recently, the current special teams coordinator for the Green Bay Packers was asked about his tough travails in college. Speaking specifically about his seven seasons at Illinois, here’s what Zook said:
Law suits and coaching searches are definitely on the horizon, but sooner or later there is a greater sense of discord that needs to be addressed. And that’s the spiraling, darkening mood of a fan base tired of being embarrassed by on-field, off-field and administrative blunders that continue to make Illinois the butt of jokes throughout the Big Ten and beyond.
How does that mood manifest itself?
Just count the unoccupied seats at Memorial Stadium, where last season against Penn State there were more than 40,000 of them.
Just speak with suite lease holders at Memorial Stadium who anguish whether the money they are paying is really worth it. Or speak with basketball season ticket holders who keep wondering if there’s ever going to be a positive breakthrough to justify the rising cost of sitting at the renovated State Farm Center.
Just listen to the negative noise emanating from Chicago, where the University of Illinois is now routinely portrayed as the most dysfunctional operation this side of the legislators who fight like children every day in Springfield.
Sure, Downstaters can say they don’t care what comes out of Chicago. But they should, especially when nearly every Illini head coach talks about the importance of winning the recruiting battle there, of winning the perception battle there, of cultivating donors among their thousands of alums living there.
Like a football skirmish against Ohio State, Illinois is losing that battle and losing it badly.
The solutions are not easy because it’s so difficult to identify the people who can solve these problems.
Who’s in charge?
Moving forward, that’s really the No. 1 question with no permanent chancellor in place and knowing the search for a chancellor typically drags on for many months.
Ideally, a strong chancellor with a sense of athletics would decide very soon if Mike Thomas can continue as the athletics director. If a decision is reached to start over in athletics, that chancellor would find a new AD and that AD would lead the search for a new head football coach. That coach must be hired in late November or early December.
Clearly, this is unlikely to follow an ideal path. Barbara J. Wilson was promoted from dean of the school’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to be the interim chancellor. She’s Mike Thomas’ current boss.
It’s far less than ideal if she fires Thomas and finds his replacement, then she is replaced by a permanent chancellor who will be the new AD’s boss but was never involved in the hiring of that person.
Someone has to hire a football coach and as Thomas learned after firing Zook in 2012, they are not standing in line fighting for this job.
It’s a tough hire no matter who conducts the search. But it feels like a tricky journey just to get to that point, to get past the impending $10 million lawsuit against the women’s basketball program, past the lawsuit against the soccer operation, past the likely lawsuits to be brought by former football player Simon Cjivanovic and by Beckman, and past the muddied chain of command at the highest administrative levels of the university.
Bill Cubit is the popular interim coach and he might have the job longer than this season simply because it will take well beyond that to untangle the many knots above him.
Just another day at the office.
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