Okay ill give some data for you then.
From 2010-2021. I took the top 30 prospects in Illinois. That is 12 recruiting classes and 360 prospects. 33/360 choose the beloved which is 9.1%, so less than 10% of Illinois prep players ended up playing at Illinois, by far the lowest percentage from ANY power-five state. On the right is top 15 players in the state. As you can see ND, IOWA and NW all do better with top in-state kids than us and have been for 13 seasons. We don't recruit the state well and haven't since 2010, so maybe its time for a new strategy, that is my main point.
Illinois NW Iowa Minn Migh Notre Dame Illinois NW Iowa Minn Migh Notre Dame 2010 1 1 2 1 0 2 2010 0 1 2 0 0 2 2011 5 2 4 1 1 1 2011 2 1 3 0 1 1 2012 2 3 5 1 0 0 2012 1 1 4 0 0 0 2013 5 4 4 0 2 1 2013 2 2 1 0 2 0 2014 2 4 0 0 1 2 2014 0 3 0 0 1 2 2015 6 5 1 2 0 3 2015 2 1 0 1 0 3 2016 1 2 4 0 0 1 2016 0 0 0 0 0 1 2017 6 2 3 2 0 3 2017 3 0 1 0 0 2 2018 3 3 3 2 0 1 2018 1 2 2 0 0 1 2019 2 3 4 2 1 1 2019 1 2 1 2 1 1 2020 0 5 5 0 1 1 2020 0 3 2 0 1 1 2021 0 1 3 6 1 2 2021 0 1 2 4 1 2 33 35 38 17 7 18 12 17 18 7 7 16
I understood your point. My point is this staff and previous staff have NEVER been all in with recruiting the State. Since you are Stat guy, how many of the kids you have listed actually had an Illinois offer? That's the number you should be reporting. Illinois didn't offer all 360 kids in your example. There is also another handful of kids that wanted to commit that Illinois wouldn't take. How can you land a kid when power 5 Coaches show the kids way more attention than Illinois. On top of that, if you are not the top 30 (per recruiting sources) in the state, you are not worth recruiting for Illinois.
Here is my example, in 2020 ESL had multiple top 30 kids in the State. So looking at the numbers you have above, going into the summer last year only two had Illinois offers (AJ and Powell). All 10 kids were presented to the staff and they watched them workout. Spraggins didn't receive an Illinois offer until blowing up while attending a Camp at Lindenwood. At this point you now have only offered 3. We now know Powells offer wasn't commit-able and technically neither was Spraggins. So basically AJ was the only kid offered and Jimbo was at the school more than Lovie. You tell me, how is that recruiting the State? Also what are the true numbers versus that BS chart you put up. You can't claim the state isn't loyal if you are not recruiting the State. That is the point. How many of the top 15 actual had Illinois offers? How many of those kids received offers after they had 20 plus offers from other schools? How can Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Notre Dame, Michigan and several others offer kids within your State before you do? Who is doing the homework?
All I am asking is be honest with the narrative. Wanting to get kids from elsewhere is not an issue. Pretending like you want kids from Illinois but not actively recruiting them is the issue.