On Bill Cubit
I can’t believe it has come to this. But every time I finish beating the horse, thinking surely he must be finished by now, someone sneaks behind my back and starts performing CPR on the bloated half-corpse until it starts making gurgling noises. So no more half measures from me. It’s time to go Kim Jung Un on the Bill Cubit Narrative.
Here’s how the Narrative goes: Bill Cubit is the type of quiet, competent, knows-his-way-around-college-football coach that Illinois has lacked for decades. Cubit’s five wins at Illinois in 2015 were, under the circumstances, a respectable return. But rather than stick with the competent but unsexy football coach already on the payroll, then-incoming athletic director Josh Whitman went distracted boyfriend meme and hired Lovie Smith. The result has been something like the ending of The Masque of the Red Death.
Those familiar with my catalogue of collected writings will already know that I am not a particularly vociferous defender of the Lovie regime and still more hostile to Whitman, especially of late. Nothing that follows here is an argument in favor of anyone currently associated with Illinois athletics.
That throat-clearing out of the way, let me now shout: Bill Cubit is terrible. He has always been terrible. He is multi-faceted terrible, a Mozart of terrible who spun concertos and operas and symphonies of awfulness seemingly without effort. I only regret that he had one contract at Illinois from which to be terminated.
Lest all that sound harsh or downright histrionic, I shall elaborate.
- Bill Cubit was offensive coordinator or head coach for three years at Illinois. During that time, the offense at Illinois slipped (per Bill Connelly’s S&P+ nerdstat) from 37th to 68th to 96th. Only twice in his time at Western Michigan and Illinois did Bill Cubit produce an offense better than 50th percentile in college football (again per S&P+).
- Cubit was handed full responsibility for picking out quarterbacks while at Illinois. The four quarterbacks he picked had zero other power-five offers among them. One is now walking on elsewhere. One left football after getting buried on the Dartmouth depth chart. One is backing up at a MAC school. One was moved to tight end here. None remains on the Illinois roster.
- In case you think that was merely a bad run, guess again. Here are the non-Illinois quarterbacks that threw over 100 passes for Cubit since 1997, when he became offensive coordinator at WMU: Tim Lester, Darnell Fields, Robert Sanford, Darius Outlaw, Kirk Farmer, Ryan Cubit, Ted Trump, Ryan Hart, Chris Lewis, Trent Edwards, Tim Hiller, Robbie Haas, Alex Carder, and Tyler Van Tubbergen. Only Edwards made the NFL, and he didn’t break out until after Cubit left Stanford. Now, many of those guys (including Edwards) Cubit didn’t pick as recruits, but the ones he did are even more anonymous: Jeff Welsh, Jonathan Drach, Chad Munson, Santino Riccio, Ryan Hart, T.C. Ostrander, and Tavita Pritchard. With a very few exceptions (Alex Carder, basically), Cubit has a career-long track record of failing to identify and develop quarterback talent, his supposed specialty.
- By no conventional metric was Cubit qualified to be head coach at a Big Ten school. Not once in eight years did Cubit so much as win his division at Western Michigan before being fired for performance reasons. He left behind a smoking, 1-11 crater for P.J. Fleck the following year.
- Despite that, Cubit was made interim head coach after the Beckman, uh, troubles. He won one fewer game with a team that returned basically everyone. He needed Middle Tennessee State to miss a late field goal and Mike Riley to badly botch an end-of-game situation to do it (seriously, Nebraska could have nearly kneeled out a game but threw a pass that fell incomplete, stopping the clock with 55 seconds left).
- The recruiting class put together by Cubit was last in the Big Ten. Three of the four highest-rated recruits have since left the program. One was a fullback. Eight others have left too, not counting a JUCO. Cubit’s lone commit for the following class was not asked to sign at Illinois and ended up at Army.
- The Bill Cubit “permanent” hire was widely and correctly seen as a debacle at the time it was made. The person who made the hire infamously described it as “not ideal.”
- One reason the hire was not ideal was that Cubit was given only a two-year contract, practically unheard of in college football because it cripples recruiting. But it was Cubit himself, so desperate for the job under any conditions, no matter how damaging to the program long term, who floated the idea.
- To make the best of the bad situation, Bill Cubit was given the largest assistant pool in Illinois history. He gave the largest portion to his son Ryan to be offensive coordinator. Ryan Cubit had never been offensive coordinator anywhere else and never worked for any other coach. After both were fired, Ryan Cubit went back (!) to selling medical supplies.
- After his firing from Illinois, Bill Cubit dropped all the way down to becoming head coach at his alma mater — in high school. The team dropped out of the state playoffs.
- Cubit told his players and the high school administration that it would be his last stop, as he had tired of the money-hungry college game. He left after one season to look for a college position. No one hired him.
- The Cubit regime was so infamous for bad mouthing decommitting players and their academic records to sympathetic reporters that one recruit went so far as to post his high school transcript to Twitter.
Bill Cubit was every bit as responsible as anyone else for cratering Illinois football. He did nothing well, pilfered the school’s generous coaching allotment to fund a sinecure for his unqualified son, and lied his ass off. Every college in America looked at Cubit this offseason and said “nope.” Any suggestion that Cubit should have been left to do further damage is borne of, at best, the purest form of ignorance, at worst the kind of sycophancy that grows inside people made to feel self-important. They should gently be shown the error of their suggestions and, should that fail, ridiculed without mercy. And now I’m done beating the horse for good.
