This is forcing the facts to fit the feelings rather than the feelings fit the facts.
The deduction here is fundamentally first and foremost deciding which coaches are likeliest to turn us down, making a blanket assumption that those are therefore "wins", and backdating all existing knowledge with a deterministic certainty that every hire in our history was destined for a certain result at the time.
It's an architecture to create the emotionally desired result: the feeling and conviction that Illinois is no longer capable of hiring someone who can lead us to our past level of success, and that the chosen villains of the piece are responsible. That relieves the cognitive dissonance.
It's also very poor reasoning.
Sure they can hire someone to get them back to the past successes but it appears likely that the candidate won't have a resume that doesn't rely on more faith than past performance.
For a variety of reasons which can be debated but are mostly immaterial, Illinois does not seem likely to hire someone with Henson, Kruger or Self's qualifications before they took Illinois job.
One must out of necessity then realize that the likelihood of success is less a given than if we hired a "Tier A" coach. There is a chance that hiring Musselman over Marshall would end up better for Illinois. Odds are against it however.
Thats what I took from EJ's post anyway