College football 2016 offseason thread

And multiple reports have them hiring .... Lovie Smith?

http://deadspin.com/illinois-football-fires-the-coach-they-just-hired-1763082996

 

LOLLINI

 

A school that's had one 10-win season since the 1980s and has been to the Rose Bowl twice since the Kennedy administration could do a lot worse than Lovie Smith (and has, many times).

 

You might do better than Lovie Smith after next season, but with recruiting being a year round thing now - having a coach players know will be there when they (hopefully) graduate and getting a coach with his name now is pretty solid.

 

How is it that a Big Ten coach only has $985,000 coming as a payout for 20 months?

 

It's OK if Illinois sucks at football ... year in, year out, the Illini are a basketball powerhouse.

Oh, wait ...

 

There's always men's gymnastics and wheelchair basketball. They're like the Alabama football of wheelchair basketball.

 

All right, you whiny bastards, you got your way. The CFP is changing ... to an hour earlier on Dec. 31.

College Football Playoff shifts kickoffs, Orange Bowl date

 

Largely irrelevant this year, since NYE is a Saturday. I guess it helps on the East Coast, assuring that Game 2 won't bump up against midnight.

 

So Lovie Smith has hired Garrick McGee away from his former patron, Bobby Petrino, to become the OC at Illinois. I saw this guy as HC at UAB for two years of the most miserable football you can imagine. It was worse than the worst of Watson Brown, and he holds the NCAA football record for most losses. UAB thought they were hiring Petrino's OC. Instead they got the guy who held the clipboard for him and made sure the right group of players ran onto the field. He was also incredibly arrogant and abrasive.

Lovie Smith recruited him in high school back in the day. Shad Khan is plowing a lot of money into the Illini, but I really doubt he's gonna get his money's worth here. McGee was the 19th highest paid assistant in the NCAA at Louisville, and I have to think that he got a raise to go to Illinois.

Bill Clark was hired late and could only recruit odds and sods, so he took McGee's players and won more games in his one season than McGee did in two.

God help them.

 

Idaho is leaving FBS and will return to the FCS Big Sky Conference for the 2018 season. Good move by the Vandals; once the Big West/WAC football dissolved and they couldn't get into the Mountain West, their goose was cooked.

They first left the Big Sky to move up to FBS 20 years ago because they thought they had to keep up with Boise State. I guess just being their state's oldest university, their state's best university academically, and by far their state's prettiest university, in a pretty nice college town, just wasn't enough.

 

Supposedly, Idaho is the first team to drop from FBS to FCS. Others have dropped football entirely (UAB, Long Beach State, Cal State Fullerton, etc.), but no one before now has dropped a level.

But will the Vandals be the last? We've heard rumblings about Eastern Michigan dropping down (or quitting football entirely) in recent weeks, and the UMass faculty senate is supposedly putting forth a resolution to drop to Division II at its next trustees meeting.