So help me out here. If we had played a typical Illinois non-con schedule and were 9-4 or 10-3 would this thread exist? Asking for a friend!
I think we'd be ok, but you have every indication that we wouldn't get that record you propose. We just lost to a team in the 200+ category at home. Kenpom has us at 113, which would say we're consistently below NIT teams. You really think a $3 mil/yr coach with a guaranteed multi-year contract should be at that level? He's in the upper escholon of compensation, yet and has no hope of getting us to the tournament.
And what about the likelihood of the program rising because we've locked down promising recruits? You can hardly count how many misses we had, and we wound up with a single, late guy, who's a project big. Most bigs are projects, so it's not unexpected, but overall the consensus is recruiting is going poorly, and certainly not anything close to above average. Can it wind up being a great class? Sure. But it's not looking very good yet, and the options have dwindled markedly.
We've played some soft schedules, but if you're losing the 200+ games, you're not only losing the 1 or 2 tough games we have, but also the 3 or 4 games we have in the 50-100 range. Our 4 wins this year are (using Kenpom)
175 Evansville
352 MS Valley
150 UNLV
98 East TN State
Those are our 4 wins after completing the non-conf, and losing 2 conference games. Atrocious for a P5 team!
Then you look at the concern about turnover and it goes from ugly to 5 alarm fire. We're already looking at performance that's historically bad, going back many decades to find a comparison, with little hope of a turn-around, other than projecting results we have no reason to expect.
So your question isn't really valid in the sense that anyone is going to believe that the performance we're seeing, translates to 10 wins with a really friendly schedule. The teams that got Weber fired were much better than what we're currently seeing, and likewise for Groce, although in fairness to Groce, he was a helluva a lot cheaper (his extension after year 2 got him to $1.7 mil annually).