Seven straight coaches with losing records, spanning 32 seasons. Back-to-back bowl appearances only once in all that time, in Ron Zook’s final two campaigns — 2010 and 2011 — which didn’t save him from being fired. Eighteen losing seasons in the last 22. Three 10-win seasons — 1983, 1989 and 2001 — in the lifetimes of the very oldest Illinois fans on the planet, whoever they are.
We could go on citing Illini football trends, all of them negative, that paint a picture of a bleak, barren landscape — with an all-too-often half-empty Memorial Stadium at its center — that’s been that way for far too long, but why belabor it? It would be news to no one.
Illini fans are well acquainted with losing. Worse, many of them by now have long been infected by a certain defeatism. Anyone who has spent more than a little time steeped in Illinois football has been subjected to a drumbeat of doubt not about the Illini’s ability to have the occasional strong season — we’ve seen them — but rather about how vexingly difficult it is to build a consistent winner in Champaign.
In other words, to “sustain success.” That’s the phrase leaned into by many fans who’ve been around long enough that their engagement ebbs and flows as their frustration simmers. The same fans have had the phrase pumped into them over time by some in the media and even by certain coaches and administrators as they struggled, and ultimately failed, to get over the football hump.
John Mackovic, who fielded teams from 1988 to 1991 that were good enough to win far more than they lost in the Big Ten, famously left for Texas because he wanted to compete for national championships and, well, Illinois wasn’t the place for that. Zook actually told the Sun-Times in 2013 that the Illini’s run to the Rose Bowl in 2007 — not as Big Ten champion, but still a hell of a high point — had “retarded” the progress of the program.
“I don’t think we were close to being where we needed to go,” Zook said. “You have that success, and then everybody thinks that you’re there, not only the players but the community and the supporters. As much as you tell them you’re not there, they don’t hear it. That’s why staying on top is harder than getting to the top.”
So sustaining success is hard enough, and being surrounded by rubes only makes it harder? Wow. Is there an award for such an extraordinary level of excuse making?
The Sun-Times spoke with several prominent players from those three 10-win teams, each of whom instantly recognized the common lament about “sustaining success” and rejected it. Not all of them wanted their names in this story.
“It’s the lazy way to assess a program,” said Howard Griffith, 55, who led the Illini in rushing and scoring in 1989 and 1990, won a pair of Super Bowls with the Broncos and is a studio analyst for the Big Ten Network. “That’s the easy way out to say it’s a tough place to win.”
Two-time All-American and College Football Hall-of-Famer David Williams was the Illini’s top receiving target in 1983 and finished his career as the second-leading receiver in NCAA history.
“I think it’s [expletive],” said Williams, 60, a sales manager in the steel industry in his native Southern California. “I think it’s horrible. I’ve heard that too many damn times.”
Tony Pashos, 43, started 47 games on the offensive line at Illinois — and was a linchpin of a stellar unit in 2001 — before a nine-year NFL career with the Ravens, Jaguars, 49ers and Browns.
“It comes off as an excuse, doesn’t it?” he said. “I would never say that. I don’t believe it.”
Pashos’ teammate Carey Davis, 42, was a rugged fullback who went on to a successful NFL career that included a Super Bowl win with the 2008 Steelers.
“People say it’s so hard to sustain success at Illinois, but I disagree completely with that,” he said. “I don’t even like to hear it.”
And said one former star who asked not to be named: “Give me a [expletive] break. We just need the right coach, the right people in charge. Maybe we have them now.”
SINCE MIKE WHITE RESIGNED in early 1988 after an NCAA investigation into alleged recruiting violations and then Mackovic left in 1991, Illinois has put a questionable succession of coaches in place. First, it promoted Mackovic’s defensive coordinator, Lou Tepper, not exactly a swing for the fences. Next came Ron Turner, former (and future) offensive coordinator of the Bears, leading to eight seasons of more bad than good. Ron Zook’s seven years sparked some excitement but far more tumult and, in the end, had amounted to too much hat and not enough cattle. The Tim Beckman show was absurd and painful to watch. Bill Cubit was merely a caretaker. Lovie Smith — hired by brand-new athletic director Josh Whitman right out of the chute — did some meaningful things in a five-year run, but winning certainly wasn’t one of them.
After all that, what Illinois has in the partnership of Whitman and third-year coach Bret Bielema might be its best shot in decades at elevating the success of the program and then holding things together long enough to truly change the school’s football narrative. The current season has been a bit of a setback — the Illini are a disappointing 3-5 — but the eight wins last season were a 15-year high in Champaign. Bielema is under contract through 2028, and both he and Whitman continue to believe Illinois is on track to move up in the world.
“In my view, we were ahead of schedule last year when we had that breakthrough,” Whitman said. “To be back in a January 1 bowl game, to do the things we did in the Big Ten, to be within a game of winning the Big Ten West, those were all, to me, really strong signs that this was working exactly as we intended it to work. …
“My view of it is we’re still ahead of schedule. Are we disappointed with where we’re at [this season]? Sure. We would’ve liked to win more games, to have some games back. But our expectation is that Illinois will continue on a positive trajectory.”
Sustainable success wasn’t ever going to happen easily at Illinois, not that Illinois is any less capable of it than a lot of other places. It’s not supposed to be easy. There never were any inherent advantages at Iowa that beat those at Illinois, but Hayden Fry elevated the Hawkeyes and Kirk Ferentz has long kept them right up there. Barry Alvarez created a Rose Bowl machine out of next to nothing at Wisconsin, and Bielema, his successor, certainly did his part to keep the Badgers near the top of the Big Ten. Think of what Bill Snyder accomplished at Kansas State, what Joe Tiller did at Purdue, how well Gary Pinkel fared at Missouri.
Those are Bielema’s brand of people. He played for or worked for most of them, which is what drew Whitman to him in the first place.
“I did have several conversations with Josh about sustaining success before [taking the job], which I think we’ve upheld,” Bielema said. “I didn’t want this thing to be coming and going. That’s still obviously the case.”
As an NFL-bound tight end playing for Turner in the late 1990s, Whitman experienced how slow and difficult progress could be. The 1997 team, Whitman’s first go-round, went 0-11, the worst record in school history. A year later, the Illini won three games. But then came eight wins and a bowl game in 1999, a heck of a payoff for all who’d done so much heavy lifting. The Illini dropped to 5-6 in 2000, Whitman’s senior season, but they won the Big Ten and went to the Sugar Bowl the year after that.
“I was incredibly unhappy with how things went in my early time as a player,” Whitman said. “Obviously, nobody wants to go 0-11 and then 3-8. But I never lost hope and confidence in my teammates and coaches. …
“In today’s day and age, it becomes very popular to say that if it’s not working at Point X, we need to change it. But sometimes you just need to do it better and you just need to do it longer.”
That’s the big idea now, even as the Illini, who are off this weekend, face a final four-game stretch in which they need to go at least 3-1 to get back to a bowl game. Can they do it? Sure, it’s possible.
And can Illinois sustain success? Of course it can. It just hasn’t happened yet.
WHY DID THE ILLINI FALL OFF after such great success in 2001? How did Turner’s teams go from 10-2 to 5-7, 1-11 and 3-8 before his ouster?
Pashos has a theory. He believes the painstaking gains made by the Illini beginning in 1999 — when a young Illini squad far exceeded expectations by going 8-4, only to dip to a frustrating 5-6 a year later — made a season like 2001 possible, and that players who didn’t arrive on the scene until 2001 or later missed out on the most important steps.
“Sometimes you have to hurt, suffer and fail to be whole,” Pashos said. “It’s worth it.”
Davis sees the 2001 squad as having had a bunch of guys who would have been two- or three-star recruits coming in — had there been such a ranking system in those days — yet went to the NFL anyway. Why were they able to do that?
“The coaches did a great job of development, first of all,” Davis said. “But, honestly, I think that group of players loved football more than anybody else. To go from 10 wins to five wins, I think we lost some players and other guys got comfortable to the level where working hard wasn’t there.”
Davis describes a few stars from Illinois’ 2022 team who are NFL rookies now — Devon Witherspoon, Sidney Brown, Chase Brown — as being not only good football players, but, more important, devout football lovers.
“You can’t just replace guys who love the game like that,” Davis said.
Bielema hasn’t given up on this season. Finishing hot would mean a great deal. Whether or not it happens, our question here is about the long game. Go on, say it with us: sustaining success.
Griffith is a big believer in the current regime.
“You have to ultimately find the right person, and that person has to also want to be there, and, in the bigger picture, I think they found the right coach,” Griffith said. “I would love for him to just stay there and continue to build because I think it’s a situation that can work long-term. And I think Whitman is the perfect guy for his job, too.”
Pashos — who played with Whitman — went to several Illinois games last season and became sold on Bielema.
“I have a lot of trust and faith in the direction it’s going,” he said. “Coach Bielema is a unique guy. He has a pro mentality, has a bright mind — he’s smart-smart — and he knows his X’s and O’s but also is a great recruiter. We’ve got it all in one guy, and also he has the experience. He could be the guy to build and sustain it.”
One former star needs more convincing.
“I think he’s a good coach,” he said, “but three wins and five losses? And we’re about to get more monsters in our conference [Oregon, Washington, USC and UCLA from the Pac-12]. Those dudes can coach, too, and they’ll all be recruiting Chicago and Big Ten country.”
Another former standout player asked, “That eight-win team we had last year, were we really good or was our schedule that good? Anybody who could score points could beat us, and now we’re kind of back to it.”
Only one thing will convince everybody, and that’s winning. And then doing it some more — a lot more.
