Cubit Rebuilds The Broncos

By Corey Rhodes
crhodes@themacdaily.com


Kalamazoo – When Bill Cubit left his post as offensive coordinator for Western Michigan University in 1999, the Broncos had just ended their season with an appearance in the Mid-American Conference title game.

Cubit had directed the nation’s 20th highest scoring team in 1998, with an offense that produced 32.7 points per game. The program was on stable ground, finishing the 2000 season with a 9-3 record and another appearance in the MAC title game.

Five years later, Cubit returned to Kalamazoo as the head coach of a program that had since detoured down a much different path. Rather than inheriting a program on the rise, Cubit was handed a scrambled team that had just finished a 1-10 campaign and had won 10 games in three years.

To Cubit, the reasons for the dramatic change were obvious.

“It was different in character, discipline,” Cubit said. “And when you say character, the shame about it is there were a lot of great kids when I came back. But there were more guys that weren’t on the same page, in comparison to when I was here before. The academics were down. Discipline was down. And then I think certainly the talent was down.”

With him, Cubit brought an entirely new coaching staff to begin an overhaul on the entire program – a process that didn’t take as long as expected. In his first year, Cubit directed the team to a 7-4 record and the greatest one-year turnaround in MAC history. The following year saw the Broncos go to a bowl game, the International Bowl, for the first time since 1988 and the Broncos repeated that task last season with a trip to the Texas Bowl.

But rebuilding the program has been about more than wins and losses for Cubit, and it took more drastic measures than teaching a group of student athletes how to play a game. Thus, rather than starting with Xs and Os, Cubit and his staff’s first item of business was changing the mental makeup of a team that was still embarrassed in the wake of the ’04 season.

“The 2004 season was one of the most miserable times, when you don’t win games, it’s not good,” said current graduate assistant Matt Ludeman, who was a redshirt sophomore in 2004. “Then, nobody really cared.”


Ryan Cubit could sense it everywhere.

A member of the Broncos quarterback unit and a transfer from Rutgers, Ryan Cubit didn’t get many opportunities early in his WMU career to enjoy the new scenery.

“We were kind of the laughingstock of campus and it’s never fun that way,” he said. “It’s never fun to walk out and know you’re representing your school and you’re putting up no wins for the program. It was frustrating, it was embarrassing, and it was an experience none of us enjoyed.”


But before the season ended, it was announced that head coach Gary Darnell would not be retained beyond that season. That opened the door for Cubit’s dad, then an offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Stanford, to make a homecoming of sorts with the Brown and Gold.

“When it was going on, I knew he was in the running but with that whole situation, it’s as hush, hush as possible,” Ryan Cubit said. “I was out of the loop with all that. I didn’t hear anything until he actually got the job. I knew it was down to a few guys and he was one of the finalists, and that’s all I knew. When he did get hired, of course, I had every question in the locker room coming to me.”

That’s also the time he knew there was hope on the horizon.

“I knew he’d turn it around,” he said. “As a head coach, he really knows what he’s doing as far as running a program. I was excited to have my family back, but I was excited to have a head coach that I knew was going to get this thing turned around.”

“One and 10 was rough, but all the sudden you get new faces in as coaches and you have a whole new mentality as to how you’re going to win,” Cubit added. “So you do anything. If the coaches tell you to run through a wall, you’re going to do it.”

That was a good thing, seeing as how smashing through concrete was about the only task not required of the players during the first summer of the Cubit coaching era.

“It wasn’t easy for any of us,” said Ludeman. “That offseason conditioning was rough.”

Mostly, what was “rough” was the severity of strength coach Nate People’s conditioning program. But a lot of the difficulty also arose off the field. Given the problems in both the classroom and otherwise that had occurred before his arrival, Cubit gave the players a second chance – but it was up to them to make the most of it.

“With a lot of players, whether it was a lack of knowledge or a lack of communication between coaches and players that led to it, there were a lot of off the field issues that were occurring,” Ludeman said. “If you’re not going to be here for the team, we don’t need you here and a lot of guys were let go.

“I did not do everything right for this team, but I was going to take my second opportunity and embrace it.”

And while punishment set a tone for the summer, Cubit also strived for team bonding.

“The biggest thing was team building and getting together,” he said. “Some groups there were 8-10 kids and were together in everything they did. If a guy was missing class, which was pretty prevalent here, the whole group got punished.

“We did lose some kids, we didn’t want to lose kids, but everybody realized we said what we meant.”

While shaping up the current roster was a high priority, so to was recruiting, as Cubit worked out of rubble towards building a foundation for the future.

“It was hard for a lot of us who were recruited and coming in,” said current senior quarterback Tim Hiller. “Put yourself in his shoes, how are you going to sell a team that was 1-10? I think the thing that drew me in the most is of everyone that was recruiting me, he was the most honest.”

Cubit said he expected that first recruiting year to be challenging, but as it turned out, it was one of the best recruiting classes of his era. That class included Hiller, who is a two-time 3,000-yard passer and former safety Louis Delmas, the No. 33 pick in the 2009 NFL Draft.

“I thought it would be interesting, but when you look at that group, there were a lot of good players that came in that first year,” Cubit said. “I think what we did is say we haven’t had a lot of success here last four years, but we’ll turn it around pretty quickly.”




Ludeman had never quite felt that way after a loss.

The Cubit era began with a road game against a ranked team in the University of Virginia, a game the Broncos lost 31-19, yet trailed by only five points heading into the final quarter.

“I remember coming off the field, and we lost the game, but everybody was excited and smiling,” Ludeman said. “It was probably the most enjoyable loss I’ve ever experienced because we realized we were alright.

“It was the first game under Cubit and we really believed we had something there, and throughout the season we just kind of fed on that.”

In his first game as a Bronco, Hiller saw what the game meant to his teammates as well.

“That team that was 1-10 got waxed by Virginia Tech (63-0) the year before, then we go down to Virginia the first game with the mindset that we were going to compete,” Hiller said. “Playing with an ACC team like that was a huge vote of confidence. I think it was a huge confidence boost just that we could feel like we could go in and compete. This probably wasn’t a program in the past that felt like it could compete.”

But as much confidence as the narrow loss to Virginia gave the team, a 56-23 loss to Toledo the following week sent a message that the work was far from over.

“The next week we played Toledo and we just got destroyed down there,” Cubit said. “And I said to the kids, ‘we’ve got four years of catching up. It’s not going to happen in a summer or spring.’ We were so far behind some of the elite teams in the league. Toledo showed us that. And that’s what showed our kids OK, it’s going to be hard all the time. So I thought Virginia was a great lesson, but I also thought Toledo might have been a better lesson.”

With Hiller filling in as a freshman for an injured Ryan Cubit, and future NFL players Greg Jennings and Tony Scheffler providing a solid offense attack and a solid defense on the other end, the Broncos went on to win seven of their next eight games and developed confidence that had been vacant for several years.

“I was happy for them because they were walking around like they were doing something,” Cubit said. “A couple games there were seniors from the previous year who were still around and I could see the hurt and resentment in them, in ‘why can’t we enjoy this’ so I could see how much it meant to them.”

The wins continued to pile up over the next few seasons, and the two bowl berths signaled the true turnaround of a once desperate program. But with the wins also came better attendance in the classroom and more work in the community, as the team has narrowed in on the 4,500-hour mark of community service during Cubit’s tenure.


Tim Hiller took WMU to the Texas Bowl in 2008.

“I think (Cubit’s) intentions are to make us well-rounded people who will be successful after football,” Hiller said. “Because football will end someday. But everybody buys into it, a lot of it is fun, working with kids. I think everyone sees it as being part of a football team is more than football. We are students and we are members of the community.”

It is all of what Cubit calls a process.

“To me, we just call it the process,” he said. “I look at academics, community service, I’m more interested in these things because football will take care of itself.”

Heading into Cubit’s fifth year, the Broncos have enjoyed almost as much success as a MAC school can have in a span of four seasons. But two things have still eluded the program: a MAC title and a bowl victory.

“We’ve just continued to harp on everybody to stay on top of things,” said Ryan Cubit, now the quartertbacks coach for WMU. “Make sure there’s a higher goal. There’s a higher goal all the time. We haven’t won MAC championship so we’re really hungry to win that thing. That’s our main focus right now and we know what it takes to get it done. There’s a lot of motivation that we have right now as a football team that we need to achieve. A championship and winning a bowl game will make our season complete.”

Even then, don’t expect the head coach to be satisfied.

“I don’t think I’m ever happy, because if you’re happy you get complacent,” Bill Cubit said. “I worry every day, I can’t ever sit there and be totally satisfied.”

That active approach towards running a football program has helped Cubit turn the Broncos back into the program he recognized during the late 90s, when WMU was a force within the MAC.

Or as Ludeman put it, it has helped “to put the WMU football team back on the map of the MAC, saying we’ll be contenders in the league and we’ll be coming every year. We’re not the rollover team we once were.”

Headlines