Lovie Smith broke a major Illini football streak when he became head coach of the Houston Texans. Smith became the first former Illini head coach since John Mackovic in 1991 to move up in the world after his time in Champaign was through. Five of the six men in between them moved down the vocational ladder, with the other making a lateral move.
So for now at least, you can put to rest the idea that Illini football is where coaching careers go to die.
Honestly, Bret Bielema is the first real, legit Big Ten Head Coach that the program has had since Mackovic, and between Bielema and Mackovic we had: a badly out of place NFL coach, an in way over his head MAC coach, a recruiting specialist, an offensive coordinator and a defensive coordinator.
So for now, let’s look at where every living ex-Illini football coach is now, and where they went after their time at Illinois was up.
Lovie Smith
Summarizing his era of Illini Football:
This was basically a bold experiment that failed. Somehow, someway, every Illini football coach since Moeller (excluding the extended interim that was Bill Cubit) made at least one bowl game, including the two disaster hires- Smith and Tim Beckman.
The low point was 63-0 to Iowa, on Homecoming 2018, which marked the worst loss in school history.
That same team also gave up exactly 63 points on two more occasions, plus a 50 burger to lowly Purdue to boot. So much for that famous Lovie D. right?
What he is/was instead of being a true Big Ten Head Football Coach:
If you ever needed more evidence that he’s a NFL coach, but not a college one, recall the Land of Lincoln hat trophy game in 2019.
Illinois had secured a bowl berth, but badly needed to end their rivalry game losing streak to Northwestern in the regular season finale.
Smith, acting like he was running a week 17 NFL team that had already secured playoff positioning, rested his starters, and the Illini got absolutely destroyed by what was Pat Fitzgerald’s worst ever NU team. Yeesh!
Football Jobs After the Illini:
He was hired by the Houston Texans to become their associate head coach and defensive coordinator in March 2021, after being canned by Josh Whitman in December 2020. He was promoted to head coach in February 2022.
He was fired after just one season, in which his team went 3-13-1. Smith is now an Advisor for the Atlanta Falcons.
Ron Zook
Summarizing his era of Illini Football:
Laugh all you want at this guy, but as the plaque above says, he won a National Coach of the Year award in 2007.ย Zook also won 7+ games three times, the last being in 2011. No Illini football coach has done that since.
Yes, his play-calling was atrocious, and he was kind of a strange bird in a lot of ways, but he got Illini football to a Rose Bowl, which was just their second appearance since 1963.
But once they got the two high-priced coordinators, and thus relegated his role, he responded by taking took his foot off the gas, and it was only a matter of time before regime change had to happen.
What he is/was instead of being a true Big Ten Head Football Coach:
An awesome recruiter, who could bring 5-stars to Illini football unlike anyone else before (or since for that matter) ever could. But he could just never get the math right, in regards to when to go for the one point, or the two point conversion.
Football Jobs After the Illini:ย
No one has had a more unique and eye-catching post Illini football gig then Zook, and no, he wasn’t a water-skiing instructor.
He actually worked as a loan officer at a bank in Ocala, FL. Not a big, national, corporate bank, but a small local institution. From there he went back into the game, first as a Special Teams Assistant with the Green Bay Packers.
He was soon promoted to ST Coordinator.
He also worked for something called the Seattle Stallions in something referred to as the American Alliance of Football in a similar role. Then he moved on to working under his former assistant, Mike Locksley, as Special Teams Coordinator at Maryland.
Current Gig:
At age 70, he might be done with football now, after having served as the Defensive Coordinator for the Seattle Dragons of the XFL last season.
Ron Turner
Summarizing his era of Illini Football:
To quote the monkey at the typewriter who so incensed Monty Burns: “it was the best of times, it was the BLURST of times!”
Indeed the Turner era of Illini football saw the highest highs and lowest lows of the past half-century.
His first team, in 1997, went winless, which is something simply impossible for a power five conference team to do these days.
They really don’t even have one win seasons (Turner had one of those too, in 2003) nowadays.
On the flip side, he led the 2001 team to a 10-1 regular season, and a Big Ten championship. However, their top 5 national ranking was short-lived as they got absolutely hammered in the Sugar Bowl by LSU.
For whatever reason, he could not parlay that success (nor the fact that he literally had a NFL charter franchise playing their home games in his program’s stadium) into any recruiting gains, at all.
Weird.
What he is/was instead of being a true Big Ten Head Football Coach: a decent offensive coordinator and the greatest lover of the fullback screen pass that the world has ever seen.
Football Jobs After the Illini:
He went right back to his previous gig, OC of the Chicago Bears (where he had served from 1993-1996), so this is the lateral move we spoke of. The Bears replaced him in 2009, so Turner then took the same role at Stanford, briefly, before then becoming the WRs coach of the Indianapolis Colts.
He then got another college head coaching gig, at Florida International, but it was disastrous. He went just 10-30 over the course of three and a half seasons. After being fired in 2016 from that job, he served as an offensive consultant with the Carolina Panthers in 2017.
by the way, I hope my fellow #Illini are continuing to Fight Hunger via Kraft products, using Zaxby’s to experience the Heart of Dallas, celebrating Liberty through Auto Zone and having Nokia add Sugar to their lives https://t.co/sx3zAJtJvv
โ Paul M. Banks (@PaulMBanks) August 16, 2022
Current Age, Gig: 70 (why is every former Illini football coach exactly 70 years old right now? You’ll see that as we move along to parts two and three of this series), out of football.
Turner came back to school in 2021, for the 20th anniversary of the Big Ten title team. This was a month after he sold his condo in the River North neighborhood of Chicago for $780,000. So he was living well in the second city.
While we did get exclusives with Kurt Kittner, Rocky Harvey and Brandon Lloyd that day, we just missed the chance to catch up with coach. Sorry.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor ofย The Sports Bank.ย Heโs also theย author of โTransatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,โ andย โNo, I Canโt Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.โ
He currently contributes toย Ravens Wire, part of the USA Today SMGโs NFL Wire Networkย and theย Internet Baseball Writers Association of America.ย His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated,ย Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times.ย You can follow himย onย Linked Inย andย Twitter.
