Two Better Than One: Why Lovie Wanted Two “Stern Teachers” For Illini's D-line

With two openings, Illini Now/SI looks at why Illinois head coach Lovie Smith decided to shake up the structure of his coaching staff.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The hiring of Illinois’ two new assistant coaches was a simple math problem for Lovie Smith.

When Smith knew he was losing Austin Clark, who he thinks is a rising star in the coaching business, as his defensive line coach, Smith knew one replacement simply wasn’t going to do. Smith has said he always considers himself and his assistants more in the role of teachers and so it’s hard to argue his Illini program was going to be in need of more faculty up front on defense.

Enter Jimmy Lindsey as Illinois’ new defensive ends coach and Al Davis as the Illini defensive tackles coach.

With only 4.5 sacks returning from Illinois’ inexperienced defensive line for the 2020 season, the player development in that area was going to arguably be the most critical. Therefore, like when parents want to see a teacher/student ratio in the schools in its district, Smith went looking for two coaches to replace Clark, who accepted the outside linebackers coach with the Miami Dolphins last month, in order to make the meeting room or football classroom smaller.

“Now we get more individual instruction,” Smith said Monday inside the Illinois football facility. “We’re going to have a lot of young defensive linemen and I thought it made sense, simple as that. I just thought it made more sense to make our team better to split the defensive line.”

Smith, who will remain as defensive play-caller, casually answered the question of how positional meetings would now work by suggesting they did this same tactic with its secondary in previous years with Gill Byrd and Keynodo Hudson. The Illini head coach, who just finished his fourth season in Champaign, said “a lot of programs have two defensive line coaches” but that’s not exactly true. Illinois is about to embark on a unique trend in the Big Ten Conference and among most power programs. Only nine of the 60 Power 5 Conference football programs utilize this kind of system with its coaching staff and Michigan State is the only Big Ten school that splits up its defensive line group among a pair of coaches.

“I think you can get more position-specific in your room because there are certain blocks that defensive ends have to deal with and defensive tackles don’t and vise versa,” Lindsey said Monday. “I think you can get more detail in the position from a teaching standpoint. I like it because you can really dial in and hone in on the fundamentals of a certain spot.”

Lindsey, shown in the video above, operated in this kind of coaching staff dynamic in his previous stop for two years at Western Kentucky and the Hilltoppers went from 12th to seventh in sacks in those pair of seasons.

Davis, who has spent the last three seasons at Hutchinson Community College ans shown in the video below, will inherit an interior unit that loses graduates Jamal Milan, Tymir Oliver, and Kenyon Jackson. Davis will be in charge of finding some instant impact talent when spring practices open in a few months.

“The group that is here now is working their butt off in the weight room and I was able to see all three of the guys who have signed already (and) they’re guys that are going wow you in terms of size,” Davis said. “They understand the expectations.”

In losing Clark and Byrd to his defensive staff, Smith knew it would be harder for him to mess up this positional development with double the attention upfront.

“I interviewed five guys personally and to me, they’re both good teachers,” Smith said. “We needed stern teachers. You got to teach football here to players who don’t know the game. That process got started this season but we’re getting ready to win a lot of football games here and we need teachers here.”