_FAN!
YOU KNOW ME. You know me.
I really tried to recover and approach Weber as positive as I could. I have a 6 sheet excel file breaking down his tenure as a head coach.
The problem was the more I looked, the worse it got.
Honestly, if we were getting Weber straight from Southern Illinois everyone would be excited; he had a fun team that played fast. I'm afraid Big 10 basketball and SLTH style has permeated his being though.
Sad really.
Weber admitted after the Purdue loss this year that he changed the way he coached. He knew he was going to get fired, so he let a couple of things slip about how they had a culture of toughness at SIU, and he tried to please people too much at Illinois. He said if he could go back and do it all over again, he would have done it the way he did at SIU.
I'm not going to come out and say that Weber is in the middle of some post-epiphany reinvention of himself, but I think we are a much more 'comfortable' environment than Illinois. We don't have their expectations, which were already completely unrealistic before Self came. Illinois is a lot like Mizzou in the sense that they think they're this destination job, but when you compare them to the K-States of the world, historical success is pretty much even across the board. In fact, in terms of NCAA tournament success, KSU ties or beats them in all but one category (Final Fours), and oddly enough, it was Weber that put them ahead of us, and he's the only one that ever took them to a title game.
Anyway, I think if you go back and look at his tenure, and remove the statistical aspects, you see a guy that even at the height of his game there was being compared and deemed less than Self. Which is totally justified, but he did better than Self in his first three years, and they still loved Bill more. I think it screwed with him. He lived in Self's shadow for nine years, and I think it changed him.
My hope is that he comes in here with Lowery (which is a hire that I approve of, actually), and they regain that approach they took at SIU where they were tough defenders and rebounders that pushed the ball up the floor. The roster is here for that. There's no need to do what he did at Illinois because, well, there's plenty of evidence that it didn't work. If he didn't learn from it, he deserves to be canned from another high major job.