It’s Lovie Smith’s turn to attempt stability at Illinois

Check out the advanced-stats glossary here. Below, a unique review of last year’s team, a unit-by-unit breakdown of this year’s roster, the full 2016 schedule with win projections for each game, and more.

In Tuesday’s Maryland preview, we discussed sleeping giants. Typically, the premise behind that label is that a school has potentially solid cash flow and lots of recruits nearby and that it just hasn’t put all the pieces together (or kept them together). There tends to be a reason these programs haven’t put the pieces together -- support from administration (or fans), politics, nearby national powers taking most of those recruits, etc.

On paper, Illinois seems to have quite a bit going for it, just like Maryland. It’s got Big Ten money, there are plenty of recruits nearby and the facilities certainly aren’t awful. And unlike Maryland, the Fighting Illini are in the right division for making a move. (Divisions are an outdated concept anyway.) And it boasts a couple of college football’s greatest players ever in Red Grange and Dick Butkus.

Illinois has been to more Rose Bowls (five) than most of the teams in the Big Ten’s lower tiers and has been to both the Rose and Sugar Bowls in this century. Again, these are accomplishments much of the Big Ten cannot boast. But something always holds Illinois back.

The Fighting Illini went to the Rose Bowl in 2007; the four years before this run, they went 8-38, and the two years after, they went 8-16. They won the Big Ten and went to the Sugar Bowl in 2001; the year before, they went 5-6, and the year after they went 5-7. Everything comes together, then everything falls apart.

Five different coaches have led them to an AP ranking of 12th at least once; only one has done it more than once. That’s crazy. When John Mackovic was taking the Illini to four straight bowls in the late-1980s, and when Lou Tepper succeeded Mackovic and took them to two more in three years, it represented the greatest level of sustained success since Robert Zuppke was dominating in Grange’s wake in the 1920s.

The instability has continued in recent years. In 2006, Illinois ranked 78th in S&P+. In 2007, 19th. In 2009, 80th. In 2011, 33rd. Illinois was all over the map in the Ron Zook years, but they did at least put together a handful of truly solid teams. In the Tim Beckman era (which bleed into the one-year Bill Cubit era), we actually saw some semblance of stability. It was mediocrity, but it was stable.

Illinois has ranked 74th, 65th, and 61st in S&P+ the last three years. Technically the Illini have improved for three straight yeasr now, but only by inches. There was no long-term vision for the program; while looking for a new athletic director, the school basically decided to punt and give Cubit -- named the interim coach when Beckman was suddenly fired in August -- an extended interim stay.

But when new athletic director Josh Whitman, a former UI tight end, took over in February, he clearly had someone in mind to lead the program toward a present that is both stable and potentially decent. In his first official day on the job, he fired Cubit. On his third official day, he hired Lovie Smith. (Here’s a timeline of Illinois’ weird year.)

Coaching in the pros is not the same as coaching in college. You don’t get as much practice time, you don’t have as much control over your roster, you have to simplify things a little bit more in college, etc. We’ve seen the transition (in both directions) backfire plenty of times, and it could trip Smith up as well.

Still, the draw of Smith should be obvious. He has 11 years of NFL head coaching experience, and that can’t hurt when it comes to recruiting. Plus, he spent 13 years as a college assistant before making the sojourn to the NFL in 1996. Plenty has changed since he was John Cooper’s defensive backs coach at Ohio State in 1995 (Cooper was also his head coach at Tulsa in the late-1970s), but he at least has a reference point for the differences between college and pro.

Smith hadn’t been on the recruiting trail for 20 years when Whitman brought him aboard. Maybe his hire isn’t one with the highest of ceilings. But if he can establish a higher floor and help Illinois move past what was a pretty ugly off-the-field end to the Beckman era, then his hire could end up successful even if he’s not winning divisional titles.

Say this much for Illinois in 2015: The Illini took advantage of their opportunities. When they faced a team that was clearly inferior, they threw haymakers. Their offense was decent, and aside from a late glitch against MTSU (the Blue Raiders only gained 368 yards against Illinois, but 153 came in two late touchdowns drives), the defense was impenetrable.

And then they played teams with pulses. The defense was merely solid, and the offense didn’t exist.

Only once did Illinois score more than 20 points against a top-60 team -- the Illini scored all of 23 against Minnesota. In a college football universe in which teams average about 28-29 points per game, that doesn’t cut it.

In the last two years, Illinois’ offense has fallen from 35th to 60th to 98th in Off. S&P+, while the defense has risen from 103rd to 72nd to 19th in Def. S&P+. That pretty clearly lays out the challenges ahead for Smith and his staff, but there’s another variable here: experience. Illinois returns quite a bit on offense and has to replace quite a bit on D.

To put it politely, Smith’s Chicago and Tampa Bay teams were not known for their dynamic offenses. In 12 seasons, he fielded an offense that ranked better than 22nd out of 32 teams in the NFL in Offensive DVOA just twice and never ranked better than 17th.

The upside to this is that he only needed a mediocre offense to win some games. His 2006 Bears offense ranked 20th, and he made the Super Bowl. And he won divisons in 2005 and 2010 with offenses ranked 28th. The guy knows how to organize a defense.

Still, Illinois’ offense desperately needed help last year, and Smith’s reputation doesn’t automatically build confidence.

Of course, he’s not going to be running the Illinois offense. That’s Garrick McGee’s job.

The 43-year old McGee comes to Champaign-Urbana with a diverse résumé. He was Pat Fitzgerald’s offensive coordinator at Northwestern, then landed on Bobby Petrino’s Arkansas staff at 2008, first as quarterbacks coach, then as offensive coordinator. He struggled mightily for two years as UAB’s head coach, then ended up back with Petrino in Louisville in 2014.

It’s easy to see what Smith sees in McGee. He blends together what we generally refer to as a pro-style offense with college concepts. His two Arkansas offenses were both loaded and dominant, and despite youth and constant turnover at quarterback, he helped Louisville twice rank 49th in Off. S&P+. Could be better, could be worse.

McGee and Petrino dabbled with mobile quarterbacks at UL, but in his first year at UI, he might have to shelve those concepts -- incumbent quarterback Wes Lunt is one of the least mobile quarterbacks in the country, at least from a “running forward with the ball” perspective.

Lunt gets the ball out of his hands quickly and doesn’t take sacks, but he carried the ball just six times for 13 yards last year. A mobile quarterback offers one more weapon for a defense to account for (one extra variable here: Lunt’s backup, Chayce Crouch, seems like far more of a dual-threat option), but if Illinois struggles again in 2016, it won’t be because Lunt won’t run. It will be because he doesn’t have enough weapons around him. Or a reliable offensive line.

Note: players in bold below are 2016 returnees. Players in italics are questionable with injury/suspension.

Ke’Shawn Vaughn’s got potential. As a freshman, he led Illinois in rushing and showed some flashes. Against MTSU, Purdue, and Northwestern (two bad defenses and one strong one), he carried 41 times for 322 yards (7.9 per carry) and three touchdowns. You can do some damage with that. When he found open field, he proved explosive with a solid 6.5 highlight yards per opportunity.

Of course, in his other eight games, he carried 116 times for 401 yards (3.5). He went games without seeing open field. Freshman backs tend to be rather inefficient while figuring out what they can and cannot get away with, but it does appear that Vaughn, the only four-star skill guy on the roster, could live up to his recruiting billing in his career.

So that makes ... one explosive weapon, two if you count receiver Malik Turner, who averaged a decent 13.1 yards per catch for the season (14.5 after September). The rest of the skill corps is either unproven or proven in the wrong way. Desmond Cain has potential as a possession receiver; he caught 67 percent of his passes last year, though he averaged only 9.3 yards per catch. And Justin Hardee’s return offers another option. But the dominant weapons don’t really exist, and if McGee and Smith want to work fullbacks and tight ends into the mix, they’ll have to do it with either newcomers or guys who have changed positions.

Only three of the top seven names on the offensive line two-deep return from a line that wasn’t particularly strong last year. The sack rates were good, but that had a lot to do with Lunt’s quick release. (On the flipside, you could pin some of the mediocre run stats on the freshman running back.)

In theory, there’s a decent mix of experience and upside here. Joe Spencer, Christian DiLauro, and Austin Schmidt have combined for 61 career starts; meanwhile, four-star guard Gabe Megginson joins the mix, as could mid-three-star sophomore Nick Allegretti. Depth is a clear and obvious concern, but perhaps if this quintet remains intact, the line could produce.

Hardy Nickerson and Lovie Smith have crossed paths a few times through the years. Smith was linebackers coach at Tampa Bay from 1996-00, and in Nickerson’s four years of playing LB for Smith, he made the Pro Bowl all four years. When Nickerson entered coaching in 2007, his first full-time gig was as Smith’s LBs coach at Chicago. And after a few years in the high school ranks, he once again became Smith’s LBs coach at Tampa Bay in 2014-15.

We don’t actually know what Nickerson might bring to the table as a defensive coordinator because he’s never been one. He’s also never been a college assistant. So he’s a bit of a blank slate.

Here’s what we know about Smith and his NFL defenses, though:

2016 will be an interesting experiment. First of all, we’ll get to see how adaptable Smith, Nickerson and company are to dealing with college offenses, which are both more simple and more diverse. Kiffin, one of the pros’ best ever defensive coaches, struggled with this for a while. In his three years as USC’s defensive coordinator, his defenses ranked 50th, 45th, and 29th in Def. S&P+.

Beyond that, though, we’ll see how Illinois’ personnel plays into this. The Illini were iffy against the run and excellent against the pass; the secondary was magnificent considering it wasn’t getting a ton of help from the pass rush. (Of course, that could have been by design; the secondary was good enough to remain conservative with the pass rush.) But while the defensive line returns just about everybody, the linebacking corps and secondary are rebuilding.

That Illinois ranked 73rd in Adj. Sack Rate was pretty impressive considering it had one pass rusher. End Dawuane Smoot was the only defender with more than two sacks -- he had eight with three forced fumbles, and he was a strong force on passing downs.

Smoot’s return, along with that of senior tackle Chunky Clements (11 non-sack tackles for loss) means that Illinois has a couple of nice weapons up front. And in Carroll Phillips, Henry McGrew, and Auburn transfer Gimel President, Illinois might have pretty good depth at end. But tackle depth is questionable, and there will be pressure on the line to hold up because the Illini will be fielding a drastically different linebacking corps.

Six of last year’s top eight linebackers are gone, and the rotation will be filled by some combination of Cal transfer Hardy Nickerson Jr., junior James Crawford, little-used sophomores Tre Watson and Julian Jones, and newcomers. Smith signed four freshman linebackers, and we should probably assume at least one fits into the rotation.

The Illinois secondary allowed just a 112.2 passer rating for the season -- 163.9 against UNC, MTSU, and Penn State (an odd sample) and 101.0 against everybody else. This was a dynamic, exciting unit with Clayton Fejedelem deployed both near to and far from the line of scrimmage and corners V’Angelo Bentley and Eaton Spence playing tough and physical ball on the outside.

All three are gone. The rest of the safety two-deep (Taylor Barton, Dillan Cazley, Caleb Day) returns, but the cornerback position is starting over. Jaylen Dunlap and Chris James are the leading returning tacklers at the position; they had 5.5 tackles each. Darius Mosely made just two tackles in 2015 but played a much heavier role in 2013-14, while redshirt freshman Frank Sumpter seemed to have a nice spring. Throw in JUCO transfer Ahmari Hayes, and you’ve got options. Now you just need some standouts. Otherwise last year’s strength will become this year’s weakness.

If you’re going to lose your placekicker, your kickoffs guy and both return men, you might as well lose them from a pretty poor special teams unit. V’Angelo Bentley was a strong punt returner, but Illinois was between mediocre and bad in most categories. Turnover can sometimes do you good.

S&P+ projects Illinois around five wins, which probably sounds about right considering the new coaching, the lack of offensive play-makers, and the turnover in the defensive back seven.

That said, the range of potential win totals is pretty broad. Illinois is given between a 34 and 66 percent chance of winning in six games; that means that if the Illini come in a little bit below their No. 76 S&P+ projection, they could end up in the 2-10 range. And if they rise into the 50s or so, an eight-win total isn’t that far away.

Honestly, though, I’m not particularly interested in the short term here. I’m most curious about the long term: How is Smith recruiting over the next year or two? How well is he adapting his defensive principles to the college game? How well is McGee able to create an offensive identity around reasonably one-dimensional or mismatched pieces?

I liked the Smith hire more than some, but he obviously has a lot of questions to answer. We should start to figure out some of those answers this fall, even if the product on the field regresses.