Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. / The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar.
Let’s set one thing straight up front: Tim Beckman failed at Illinois. That’s not so damning in and of itself — just about all football coaches have failed at Illinois— but the way in which Beckman failed has become a watchword for failure more generally, at least among Illinois fans. That strikes me as not entirely fair. The Beckman era was not uniquely bad for Illinois football. That is no doubt damning with faint praise. By the same token, though, the program left behind by Beckman was not as broken as common wisdom now seems to accept. A fair accounting of Beckman’s legacy, five years after his downfall, requires accepting that as true.
The 2011 Minnesota Golden Gophers were terrible. By halfway through the season, Minnesota was on track to finish as perhaps the worst Big Ten team in my lifetime. Outside of conference play, Minnesota dropped games to a very good FCS team in North Dakota State and a zombie FBS team in New Mexico State. A freak win against Iowa ended the GopherQuest to be the worst of the worst, but Minnesota straggled towards the finish line with big losses to Wisconsin and Northwestern. The final game against bowl-bound Illinois figured to be an afterthought.
Illinois gained 160 yards against Minnesota in a 20-point loss. The next day, Ron Zook was fired.
The dismissal was not a shock. Illinois finished 2011 with its second consecutive bowl appearance, the first time the Fighting Illini had pulled that off since the early 90s. And yet the edifice was crumbling, as just about everyone recognized at the time. The once-ballyhooed recruiting classes had reverted to Illinois’ mean. The top recruit of the 2010 class was a mid-level three star wide receiver, Darius Millines; apart from the four-star Jon Davis, the 2011 was much of the same; the 2012 class hadn’t shaped up to be any better, even before the season fell apart. Zook with talent was a white-knuckled ride alternating between dizzying highs and perplexing lows. Zook without talent was … well, what good is a Ron Zook without the talent?
New Athletic Director Mike Thomas decided not to find out. After fruitlessly chasing a few bigger names, Thomas played MAC roulette and landed on Tim Beckman, who had rejuvenated a Toledo program reeling after a point-shaving scandal.
Some of the dangers of the Beckman hire were obvious from the outset. Toledo is generally among the better MAC programs, and so their return to near the top of the conference could be seen as merely a reversion to normal rather than evidence of Beckman’s wisdom. Beckman’s pedigree lied on the defensive side, but Toledo won with offense in an offense-happy division. How much of Toledo’s improvement could really be chalked up to Tim Beckman?
But Illinois is not the kind of football program that has its choice of coaches — Thomas found that out first-hand — and so the task for any athletic director will be to best sort through the flawed group of third-tier candidates available to them. And the team Beckman had assembled was a fair bit better than its 8–4 record suggested. A three-point less separated Toledo from the division (and likely conference) championship in the MAC. Earlier that season, Toledo had come within a failed fourth-down conversion from being the first team in Ohio to defeat Ohio State since 1921. The remaining losses included a blowout to #8 Boise State — no great shame in that — and a “loss” at Syracuse that Toledo had almost certainly won. Bill Connelly’s SP+ ratings at that time had Toledo as comfortably within the top 25; that was downgraded with subsequent revisions to the algorithm, but Toledo still rated as best in the MAC and among the best of the mid-majors. That the head coach of Toledo would take over a struggling program in a major conference was the natural order of things.
The indictment against Tim Beckman usually progresses through four counts. The first is the disastrous 2012 season, his first year, in which Illinois failed to be even remotely competitive despite the talent left over from Zook. The second is the overall results, with the program topping out at a 6–7 campaign in 2014. The third is Beckman’s buffoonish public persona. The fourth is the Simon Cvijanovic scandal that ended his tenure.
All four put together amounted to adequate cause for Beckman’s firing. But none was quite so damning as it appeared then or is popularly remembered now.
The 2012 Illinois football campaign was undoubtedly a disaster, to be sure. The lone win over an FBS team came on opening day over (eventual offensive coordinator and interim head coach — more on this later) Bill Cubit and Western Michigan. Apart from that game and a win two weeks later over doorstop Charleston Southern, Illinois was scarcely competitive against the remainder of the schedule. The problem was not just that Illinois went 2–10 but that it looked abysmal doing so. Any honeymoon that a new head coach might have accrued had dissipated before the final whistle blew against Northwestern (a 50–14 loss) to end the season.
Beckman bears his share of the blame for the debacle. The Illinois team, after all, had just finished consecutive 7–6 seasons, and although the 2011 season had ground to an ignominious end (including the disaster in Minneapolis that ended for good the Zook era), things had not been that bad since Zook had begun digging out from the wreckage left behind by Ron Turner. Beckman had hired assistants long on recruiting chops and short on actual coaching experience, a weakness that become obvious very early in 2012.
Some of Beckman’s problems, though cannot be laid entirely at his own feet. One problem was the lack of talent described above. After years of punching above its wallet on the recruiting trail, things went ice cold following Zook’s 2009 letdown, a season that started with Heisman campaigns and ended 4–8. Still worse than the lack of star power in the late Zook recruiting classes was that his usually astute eye for overlooked talent had become glassy. The best — not highest-rated, but best — recruit of 2010 was a walk-on safety (ED: a careful reader reminds me that this isn’t true; Fej was a transfer and a Beckman recruit); the second-best was a fullback. The 2011 class was not quite so fallow, but it was close, and the best player was a second-year offensive lineman unlikely to do a new head coach much good by himself. Illinois fans knew on some level that things had gotten bad, but only in hindsight is it clear how little talent was in the pipeline.
If talent was a problem, so too, likely, was culture — and not just in the sense that all new coaches complain about culture. Ron Zook had has strengths, but the lengthy wrap sheet compiled by Illinois football players in his tenure is evidence enough that discipline was not among them. In the final two years alone, Evan Frierson was arrested from the team for aggravated battery; Chris Jones was as well; Hugh Thornton and Michael Buchanan were arrested for assault and DUI, respectively; Jason Ford was arrested for driving on a suspended license; Kenneth Knight and Jordan Frysinger were arrested just prior to Zook’s departure. There may have been more; I stopped looking after the first page of Google results.
None of this was Zook’s fault, exactly. These mistakes were the mistakes of the players, not him, and not all of the arrested players were bad eggs. And in a few instances, too few, Zook took decisive action. But one of Beckman’s charges upon entering the program was to instill a culture of discipline that had up to that point been lacking. The returning players — most of them, of course, not criminals or ne’er-do-wells— chafed at the new restrictions, which they felt to be needless. Fault lines opened almost immediately, with the older players taking to calling themselves “The Zook Boys” in contrast to the younger Beckman recruits.
A better coach would have found a way to wring results from that group, despite the hurdles. But hurdles they were, and not hurdles of Beckman’s making.
The bottom of the Beckman era was low but thankfully short-lived. The 2013 Illinois team was bad, but a reasonably competitive bad: an overtime loss to Penn State in Happy Valley; a home game against Ohio State that stayed within 12 points until 11 minutes into the fourth quarter; wins against a decent Cincinnati team and a putrid Purdue team. SP+ reflects the change; Illinois was still bad, but not historically bad, just normal bad, improving bad, better (by some distance) than any of Lovie Smith’s first three teams at Illinois. 2014 was still another step forward, both statistically and on the field, with a bowl berth, a win over a ranked team, and a win against Penn State. All this, remember, while leaning on the poor 2010–11 recruiting classes
Part of the reason for the improvement is that Beckman’s recruiting had turned out to be OK — not great, but OK. The 2012 class — the class left behind by Zook and hastily reassembled by Beckman — was largely a wash, but the 2013 and (especially) 2014 classes were surprisingly productive. The lowly rated 2014 class is especially worth dwelling upon; brought in near the nadir of the Beckman era, the class included future NFL players in Jihad Ward, Geronimo Allison, Chase MacLaughlin, and Nick Allegretti; solid college contributors in Tito Odenigbo, Tre Watson, and Malik Turner; and all-time what-could-have-been candidate Mike Dudek. By the end of his time at Illinois, Beckman was recruiting at levels not quite at the height of the Zook era, but not terribly far off. The 2015 class measured in the top half of the Big Ten (the last time that has happened) and included Ke’Shawn Vaughn and Jamal Milan among the signees, both committed on the final day of the signing period.
What would have been had Beckman continued as head coach? Impossible to say, of course, but it’s worth noting that the 2015 team was probably better than its record suggested. For one thing, that Illinois team is the last that Vegas considered even remotely competitive within the context of the Big Ten. Only twice was Illinois a double-digit underdog that year: a 10-point spread at Iowa, and a 17-point spread against Ohio State. Every other game was considered at least plausibly competitive ex ante, including games at North Carolina, Penn State, and Minnesota; in fact, Illinois would have been favored against a ranked Northwestern to end the season if only Mike Thomas had not stupidly given the home game away to Soldier Field. The results, too, were for the most part not uncompetitive despite the interim leadership of one of the most inept men in college football, the lone FBS coach to lose to that horrid 2012 Illinois team, Bill Cubit.
To be sure, Illinois was not on a trajectory for greatness under Tim Beckman. But it was on a trajectory for middling respectability. Even those lofty heights have been largely unattainable since then.
I won’t dwell on the Beckman press conferences, which were legendarily terrible. I will offer two points in tepid defense. First, college football coaches are notoriously buffoonish. The problem only seems to matter when the coaches are losing. Second, by all accounts — including antagonistic accounts — Beckman was simply a different person behind closed doors: lucid, easy-going, approachable, normal. That he remained in the good graces of several coaches, including Urban Meyer, after the scandal fallout is only partial evidence of that — see point one — but so too is the fact that, as results began to materialize, so too did Beckman’s connection with recruits. Whatever the effect on fans and reporters, the media performances did not appear to unduly hinder what was happening behind the scenes.
None of this, officially, is why Tim Beckman was fired at Illinois. Instead, the firing came after player complaints of mistreatment by the coaching staff, with the allegations of Simon Cvijanovic proving especially loud and especially explosive. I step gingerly here, because I shed no tears over a football coach losing his position over abuse of authority. For too long, highly-paid coaches have acted like louts and gotten away with it. Football is a game, not war. We have a right not to tolerate nonsense from glorified gym teachers.
Still, though, the most damning details remembered from the abuse imbroglio were either unproven, found to be false, or taken badly out of context.
- Perhaps the most widely disparaged quote from Beckman relayed in the report prepared following the investigation was that the coach did not “believe in hamstring injuries.” The context of the quote was obvious — and, in fact, was set out in the report itself: not that hamstring injuries aren’t real, but that players could often take steps to avoid such injuries before they happened.
- The report of Beckman “fighting” one of the players was found to be unproven by the investigative report, which (on the whole) was not generous to Beckman. Specifically, the report found “ ample reason for Coach Beckman to intervene and that the extent of his engagement was appropriate.”
- The lone “troublesome incident” not involving injuries set out in the report involved Beckman, early in his tenure, “forcefully” grabbing a helmet “perched on top” of a player’s head, throwing it to the ground, and ordering the player to run stadium steps after the player repeatedly refused to wear the helmet properly. Again, this is silly, loutish behavior, but not exactly the stuff of melodrama.
- The most troublesome accusation by a player — that a member of the coaching staff had told him to stop taking anti-depression medication — turned out to be true. It also turned out to not be Beckman, but Bill Cubit, who had made the suggestion. Beckman was not found to be involved in the incident in any way.
The remainder of the allegations, many of these proven, amount to “stupid, but football coach”: pressure on players to return from injuries, mean-spirited comments to players about them being terrible, and the like. I have no problem with these offenses amounting to fireable crimes. But to say that these standards have been applied inconsistently is an understatement. At a minimum, I find it hard to disagree with former North Carolina head coach Larry Fedora, who offered upon (briefly) hiring Beckman post-scandal that “I mean, the guy didn’t win enough games. That’s all it was.” Maybe not all there was, Larry, but that’s closer to the truth than a lot of the anguished folks who reported the quote would care to admit.
What is the point of this obituary? Not much more than boredom, really. The Tim Beckman era has now fully passed. Only one player recruited by Beckman remains on the Illinois football team. We are now six years removed from l’Affaire Cvijanovic. No Illinois football fan, including me, is nostalgic for the early-to-mid ’10s. And as I said at the outset, Beckman failed as Illinois head football coach. No amount of revisionism will change that assessment.
But I do believe that accuracy is important for its own sake, and that the remembered history of the era is somewhat different from the events that actually transpired. None of that matters in any real sense; nothing about Illinois football today will change if Beckman was, in some Platonic sense, better or worse than he is remembered. Still, he should be remembered for who he was, not who he is now imagined to have been.
