Hope For The Offensive Line?

It hasn't been officially announced yet, so it may not even happen, but it didn't take long to find out that Bill Cubit would be replacing Chris Beatty as our offensive coordinator. Hell, I barely had any time to start digging into who the possible replacement would be before reports first surfaced about Cubit.

The same cannot be said for the plan to replace Luke Butkus. There have been names floating around, but nothing concrete has emerged anywhere. Up until last night the name I kept hearing was San Diego Chargers offensive line coach Mike Sullivan.

That was until late Sunday night when I heard an interesting name pop up for the job, and it's apparently started hitting the message boards as well.

Danny Hope.

Yes, that Danny Hope. Now it's important to make a distinction here that I'm not reporting that Danny Hope is going to be Illinois' new offensive line coach. This is just a rumor that I heard on Sunday and apparently I'm not the only one who has heard this rumor in the last 24 hours, so it's possible there's something concrete to it.

I've tried to dig further, but at the moment I'm not having much success.

Anyway, if Danny Hope does end up in Champaign, it would be hard to be upset about the move. Hope would become the second former head coach Beckman added to the staff along with Cubit, and that is certainly an improvement over what we had on the staff last season.

Not to mention that Hope was Purdue's offensive line coach under Joe Tiller for years while Purdue was running an offense similar to what Cubit will probably be running here. And while he may have just been canned at Purdue, he still managed to get the Boilermakers to a bowl game the last two seasons. That may not have been good enough for Purdue, but it's still impressive considering that Purdue hadn't been to a bowl game since 2007 before that.

Plus, anytime you can add a mustache like that to your coaching staff, you've gotta do it.

If I learn any more about this rumor, you'll be the first to know.

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