Lovie Smith

"I hope you and your families are doing ok during this pandemic. We, of course I have a big family, have a lot of concern for my family  and for our staff and our team. We're doing everything that we can to keep them safe. Eventually, we are going to beat this. No. 1, do what the experts tell us to do. As a coach, I'm constantly telling our players to be coachable and I, and we, have to be coachable. And we're doing everything that the experts tell us to do. Practicing social distancing. Quarantine if that's necessary. Washing our hands. All of the things that the experts are telling us to do is what we, my family, is doing and what we're asking our players to do. 

Luckily all three of our offense, defense, and special teams systems are still in place. Theres' a lot we can get done. And as far as going out and recruiting, this was going to be a valuable time for our coaches to go out and see. To me a part of the evaluation process is being able to see guys live. So we're missing all that, there's no way around that. But everyone is missing it so we'll just have to find other ways. Rely on video a little bit more than we normally would. 

When you say adapting, this is what we do. Each day we will watch video, if we were in our office we'd be watching video daily and moving our board around. Looking at finding new guys. Our recruiting plan that we had in place, none of that has changed except for we can't see guys. We can't get them on campus so we have to find other ways. Getting them video, showing them Champaign, the University of Illinois, our coaches, you know just everything about our program. Besides that, it's kind of business as usual for us. We're just all doing it remotely from different places. There's communication. We're recruiting. There's a recruiting meeting five days a week still."

-------

Lou Hernandez