In dating, people aren't really looking for their Mr. or Mrs. Charming — they're looking for somebody that was better than the last. Could this work for Illini football? It just might.
Tim Beckman is out the door, and OC Bill Cubit is the next man up.
From ESPN:
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Bill Cubit keeps a thick binder with the heading "Leadership and Book Notes" behind his desk at Illinois.
It's a coaching scrapbook spanning the past two decades of his career. Bear Bryant's speeches are in there. So are Bo Schembechler's. There's a page devoted to Vince Lombardi ("What it takes to be #1"), followed by one for Ara Parseghian ("the Great Interval: Effort, execution and endurance"). Cubit is a ravenous reader -- he'll consume six or seven books during rare vacations, mostly on coaching and leadership -- and any nuggets he extracts go into the binder.
"I always go back before the season and double-check stuff," Cubit said, "just to see if there's something that makes sense."
The binder provides plenty of answers, but making sense of what has happened at Illinois isn't one of them.
Illini football, baby! FEEL THE EXCITEMENT.
Low-hanging, rotting fruit aside, I like this Bill Cubit fella. He's been in the game for 40 years and has yet to be a head coach (at a Power 5 school) — Rittenberg calls the interim-head coaching job the "pinnacle" of Cubit's career — so he may not be cutout for the long haul, but he might just be the right man to help Illinois weather its latest storm.
