Bret Bielema Will Win at Illinois

Illinois announced this morning that they are hiring former Wisconsin and Arkansas coach Bret Bielema to a six-year deal. Since he was fired at Arkansas, Bielema has been an assistant for the New England Patriots and New York Giants. This is a great hire by Illinois.

The opinion that Bielema will succeed represents a pretty strong about-face from me. My first story at OutKick, about eight years ago, as an outside submission to the site's bullpen, was expressing pure unbridled joy that Arkansas hired Bielema away from my alma mater Wisconsin. My argument was that Bielema feasted on cupcakes and the dregs of the Big Ten, was bad at managing the clock, and would not succeed in the SEC.

While that opinion wound up being accurate for his performance at Arkansas, there are elements of Bielema's coaching that I have come to realize that I underrated while he was coaching the Badgers. He was brusque and aggressive, and this attitude helped him land Russell Wilson as a transfer from NC State for what wound up being the most fun Wisconsin season in recent memory.

The Badgers replaced Bielema with Gary Andersen, who tried to turn the team from a meat and potatoes smash-mouth football roster into a more finesse operation, with disastrous results. Wisconsin won the Big Ten three times with Bielema, and has not won it since he left.

The program has been on the upswing with Paul Chryst and I believe there are very bright days ahead especially in the Graham Mertz era, but in my opinion Wisconsin has still not gotten back to the level of physicality that they had under Bielema and Barry Alvarez.

I'm not saying that Bielema will win the Big Ten at Illinois. That is going to be very rare for anybody other than Ohio State to do at least until an NFL team hires Ryan Day to be their head coach. That being said, I think Bielema will build a program that could win the Big Ten west, and give fits on any given Saturday to Wisconsin, Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State. That's about as lofty a goal as Illinois could feasibly hope for at this juncture for their program, and they hired the ideal coach to set about achieving it.