When Matt Painter took over as head coach at Purdue, he inherited a mess. In Gene Keady's final season, the Boilermakers lost 21 games. However, in Painter's second season - in the year before his highly-touted recruiting class (Hummell, Johnson, and Moore) arrived in West Lafayette - he guided Purdue to the NCAA tournament and even won a game. And of course, things have only improved for Purdue since.
Contrast that story with Painter's former boss. Despite being in year two of the "Weber Can Recruit" era (two-thirds of Weber's highly-touted recruits already on campus), the Illini find themselves in a familiar position: kicking around the .500 mark in conference. If they beat Indiana on Saturday to get to 9-9, their overall Big Ten record in the five years since Dee Brown and James Augustine graduated will be exactly .500 (44 wins and 44 losses). For the fourth time in five years, the Illini will enter the Big Ten tournament needing to win a game to be sure of getting an NCAA tournament bid. And next year we can expect more of the same (if not worse), since four seniors are departing and only five players on the 2011-12 roster will have played any meaningful minutes in their Illini careers.
To summarize: Matt Painter needed only two years to reverse a horrible situation at Purdue; he started doing so before his best players arrived; and he's kept the arrow pointing upwards over the last four years. Even if we gloss over the fact that Bruce Weber didn't inherit the situation he's in - he created it - he's now had two years with more talented players on hand, and the program still shows no signs of progress. So how much more time does Weber get to turn the Illini program around? My two cents: if it hasn't happened by now, it's looking less and less likely that it's ever going to happen.
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