From IlliniNow...
'Sometimes, Divorce Is a Good Thing': How & Why Lovie Smith Turned Illinois Into ‘Transfer Portal U’
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In almost every conceivable way, Lovie Smith’s life is defined by the ideas of loyalty and commitment.
If you were to follow the fifth-year Illinois head football coach as he makes his way around his new office, the recently opened 107,650 square foot, $79.2 million on-campus football facility, you would hear the 62-year-old still constantly reference the coaches in his hometown of Big Sandy, Texas, that helped shape him into the football man you see and hear now.
Smith has remained married to the same woman, MaryAnne, who he met on a blind date in 1978 at a pizza parlor when he was a junior at the University of Tulsa. Smith still contributes money monthly to his former local Methodist church in Texas, even though he hasn’t resided in in Texas for nearly 40 years.
And yet, it was the same Lovie Smith who stood in the second floor lobby of his program’s football palace and touted the virtues of divorce.
Not a marriage divorce, mind you. Lovie and MaryAnne got married a month after that first blind date while they were still undergraduate students at Tulsa and have been together for nearly four decades. No decommitment needed there. Three children later (one of which is now on Smith’s staff at Illinois), Lovie and MaryAnne Smith couldn’t be happier. You wouldn’t know it from his personal life, but Lovie Smith happens to be a big proponent of divorce in his professional life. In college football, we now refer to that kind of divorce as the transfer portal.
“Is divorce a part of our lives and our world? Yes, it is. Sometimes divorce is a good thing. And then both parties can benefit from it. There’s a certain type of guy we’re interested in but for the most part, these (transfer) guys have demonstrated they’re serious students and they’re looking for something we can give them.” —Illinois head coach Lovie Smith
Transfers having an impact in college sports and particularly in the massive revenue generating endeavors such as football and basketball certainly isn’t a foreign concept, as players have been moving from program to program for several decades. However, since its inception on Oct. 15, 2018, the transfer portal has been a tool for college athletes and coaches to make the transition a more streamlined process than before. No longer can a coach ban a player from signing with a conference or rival program, no longer do coaches wanting to recruit the transfer need to ask for permission from the former university to talk to the player. Coaches can now easily scroll through a database to find what was always assumed would be the supplemental parts needed to fill inefficiencies of the team's current roster.
“I don’t see it as a negative, I see it as a positive,” Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt said in May 2019 from the Southeastern Conference spring meetings in Destin, Fla. “We’ve had very few [players] that've gone in it. You're talking about someone like myself, who transferred, you know? So I spent two years at a place I really loved at Middle Tennessee.”
Born in Rainsville, Ala. and the son of a high school coach, Pruitt left his starting defensive back role at MTSU to finish his college career at his dream school—the University of Alabama. Pruitt played in 12 career games for the Crimson Tide under head coach Gene Stallings before beginning his own coaching career.
“I left there not because I was not happy or because I wasn’t playing. I left there because I had a dream of doing something else,” Pruitt said.
But what if the initial purpose of the transfer portal was flipped on its axis. What would happen if it became the primary recruiting tool for the rebuilding and reloading of a large football program? Smith and his staff at Illinois are bound and determined to figure out the answer to this question.
Why Illinois And Its ‘Moneyball’ Recruiting Approach Prioritizes The Transfer Portal
Four years ago, Lovie Smith would’ve likely never anticipated he’d need the transfer portal beyond occasional graduate transfer plug-and-play athletes to fill a certain need on his depth chart. Before the Santa-like beard grew on the head coach’s face in Champaign, Smith was under the impression—like everybody else involved in his hiring on March 6, 2016—recruiting doors would instantly open before he could tout those three magical letters: N-F-L.
The transfer market has been somewhat condemned as “free agency,” but Smith rarely used that option during his successful time in pro football. In 2006, only one of Smith’s defensive starters in Chicago came via the free agent market as the Bears rode that defense to the franchise’s most recent Super Bowl appearance.
After being an assistant and head coach in professional football from 1996–2015, his own boss at Illinois stated his NFL ties would lead the way to unprecedented recruiting success with high school talent.
“There’s not a living room in America that’s not going to open their doors to Lovie Smith and his staff,” Illinois director of athletics Josh Whitman said before introducing his first coaching hire.
And while those front doors of houses of program-changing recruits might have initially opened for Smith and his primarily NFL-based staff of assistant coaches, they closed just as quickly when results on and off the field didn’t initially occur. In his first three seasons, Illinois won just nine total games and four Big Ten conference games, resulting in his five years of recruiting classes falling short of initial hopes. In five recruiting cycles, Smith’s Illini program has signed just five four-star high school prospects and none who resided in the state of Illinois.
“The lack of on-field winning (including .285 Big Ten win percentage) combined with the lack of success at the NFL draft (five total NFL draft picks through four years) is hard to ignore,” said John Garcia, Sports Illustrated’s Director of Football Recruiting. “The old mentality of recruiting was to be able to contribute and win in college while the new one focuses more on the development toward the NFL. Illinois hasn't been successful on either side of that coin.”
Smith quickly began to learn in-state talent wasn’t yearning to get that scholarship offer from the Illini and previous staffs didn’t make the necessary inroads for immediate recruiting success.
“In my 13 years of coaching I haven’t had a relationship with U of I at all,” Plainfield North High School head coach Anthony Imbordino told The Daily Illini, the university student newspaper. “U of I hasn’t really come up as much as you would think to the schools that I have been to in the Chicagoland area.”
Imbordino was the head coach of three-star 2020 wide receiver Marcellus Moore, who has Olympic-style track speed and was a first-team All-State selection on the football field, but ultimately chose Purdue.
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST...
'Sometimes, Divorce Is a Good Thing': How & Why Lovie Smith Turned Illinois Into ‘Transfer Portal U’
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In almost every conceivable way, Lovie Smith’s life is defined by the ideas of loyalty and commitment.
If you were to follow the fifth-year Illinois head football coach as he makes his way around his new office, the recently opened 107,650 square foot, $79.2 million on-campus football facility, you would hear the 62-year-old still constantly reference the coaches in his hometown of Big Sandy, Texas, that helped shape him into the football man you see and hear now.
Smith has remained married to the same woman, MaryAnne, who he met on a blind date in 1978 at a pizza parlor when he was a junior at the University of Tulsa. Smith still contributes money monthly to his former local Methodist church in Texas, even though he hasn’t resided in in Texas for nearly 40 years.
And yet, it was the same Lovie Smith who stood in the second floor lobby of his program’s football palace and touted the virtues of divorce.
Not a marriage divorce, mind you. Lovie and MaryAnne got married a month after that first blind date while they were still undergraduate students at Tulsa and have been together for nearly four decades. No decommitment needed there. Three children later (one of which is now on Smith’s staff at Illinois), Lovie and MaryAnne Smith couldn’t be happier. You wouldn’t know it from his personal life, but Lovie Smith happens to be a big proponent of divorce in his professional life. In college football, we now refer to that kind of divorce as the transfer portal.
“Is divorce a part of our lives and our world? Yes, it is. Sometimes divorce is a good thing. And then both parties can benefit from it. There’s a certain type of guy we’re interested in but for the most part, these (transfer) guys have demonstrated they’re serious students and they’re looking for something we can give them.” —Illinois head coach Lovie Smith
Transfers having an impact in college sports and particularly in the massive revenue generating endeavors such as football and basketball certainly isn’t a foreign concept, as players have been moving from program to program for several decades. However, since its inception on Oct. 15, 2018, the transfer portal has been a tool for college athletes and coaches to make the transition a more streamlined process than before. No longer can a coach ban a player from signing with a conference or rival program, no longer do coaches wanting to recruit the transfer need to ask for permission from the former university to talk to the player. Coaches can now easily scroll through a database to find what was always assumed would be the supplemental parts needed to fill inefficiencies of the team's current roster.
“I don’t see it as a negative, I see it as a positive,” Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt said in May 2019 from the Southeastern Conference spring meetings in Destin, Fla. “We’ve had very few [players] that've gone in it. You're talking about someone like myself, who transferred, you know? So I spent two years at a place I really loved at Middle Tennessee.”
Born in Rainsville, Ala. and the son of a high school coach, Pruitt left his starting defensive back role at MTSU to finish his college career at his dream school—the University of Alabama. Pruitt played in 12 career games for the Crimson Tide under head coach Gene Stallings before beginning his own coaching career.
“I left there not because I was not happy or because I wasn’t playing. I left there because I had a dream of doing something else,” Pruitt said.
But what if the initial purpose of the transfer portal was flipped on its axis. What would happen if it became the primary recruiting tool for the rebuilding and reloading of a large football program? Smith and his staff at Illinois are bound and determined to figure out the answer to this question.
Why Illinois And Its ‘Moneyball’ Recruiting Approach Prioritizes The Transfer Portal
Four years ago, Lovie Smith would’ve likely never anticipated he’d need the transfer portal beyond occasional graduate transfer plug-and-play athletes to fill a certain need on his depth chart. Before the Santa-like beard grew on the head coach’s face in Champaign, Smith was under the impression—like everybody else involved in his hiring on March 6, 2016—recruiting doors would instantly open before he could tout those three magical letters: N-F-L.
The transfer market has been somewhat condemned as “free agency,” but Smith rarely used that option during his successful time in pro football. In 2006, only one of Smith’s defensive starters in Chicago came via the free agent market as the Bears rode that defense to the franchise’s most recent Super Bowl appearance.
After being an assistant and head coach in professional football from 1996–2015, his own boss at Illinois stated his NFL ties would lead the way to unprecedented recruiting success with high school talent.
“There’s not a living room in America that’s not going to open their doors to Lovie Smith and his staff,” Illinois director of athletics Josh Whitman said before introducing his first coaching hire.
And while those front doors of houses of program-changing recruits might have initially opened for Smith and his primarily NFL-based staff of assistant coaches, they closed just as quickly when results on and off the field didn’t initially occur. In his first three seasons, Illinois won just nine total games and four Big Ten conference games, resulting in his five years of recruiting classes falling short of initial hopes. In five recruiting cycles, Smith’s Illini program has signed just five four-star high school prospects and none who resided in the state of Illinois.
“The lack of on-field winning (including .285 Big Ten win percentage) combined with the lack of success at the NFL draft (five total NFL draft picks through four years) is hard to ignore,” said John Garcia, Sports Illustrated’s Director of Football Recruiting. “The old mentality of recruiting was to be able to contribute and win in college while the new one focuses more on the development toward the NFL. Illinois hasn't been successful on either side of that coin.”
Smith quickly began to learn in-state talent wasn’t yearning to get that scholarship offer from the Illini and previous staffs didn’t make the necessary inroads for immediate recruiting success.
“In my 13 years of coaching I haven’t had a relationship with U of I at all,” Plainfield North High School head coach Anthony Imbordino told The Daily Illini, the university student newspaper. “U of I hasn’t really come up as much as you would think to the schools that I have been to in the Chicagoland area.”
Imbordino was the head coach of three-star 2020 wide receiver Marcellus Moore, who has Olympic-style track speed and was a first-team All-State selection on the football field, but ultimately chose Purdue.
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST...
