Personally I believe some fans are being a bit too dismissive of Martin.
If he comes to Champaign, we stand a great chance at retaining our entire '17 class, and adding Smith to boot. Martin is already recruiting Smith, and Dosunmu from Morgan Park, and Charlie Moore is proving that Martin will allow freshmen lots of PT out of the gate. That's a huge plus in regards to Dosunmu! Then you have the continued Southwestern Conference pipeline in Liddell and Hargrove, along with possibly Finke still in play.
And it seems that most of the caveats people have with him is his under-performance in the NCAA tourney, most notably last season's first round exit as a #4 seed.
Well, the most decorated coach in Illinois history, Lou Henson, had teams that regularly under-performed in the NCAA tourney. 5 times, in fact, during that "golden age" of the 80's alone (Utah, Alabama, Austin Peay, Villanova and Dayton in '89-90). All choke jobs!
Sure, he shepherded some of the most exciting teams in my lifetime, featuring some of the best talent from my hometown of Chicago, but he more often than not failed to live up to expectations in the postseason. Though it cannot be understated that Lou was also one of the unluckiest coaches in the history of the Big Ten, a topic that I'd be more than happy to delve into on a future thread.
Anyway, if Martin can recruit the SWC well, and make inroads into the CPL on a consistent basis, I am willing to live with some occasional under-performance in the postseason as long as we can become relevant again, and at least make the NCAA tourney a reasonable expectation every season once again, instead of an outlier.
In the foreseeable future, as far as recruiting is concerned, he will have that chance beginning as early as next season, IF he can retain our '17 class and add Mark Smith.
And having a 10 man core of Frazier, TJL, Smith, JCL, Pickett, Williams, Nichols, Black, Finke and Tilmon is hardly working with a bare cupboard. In fact, quite the contrary (plenty of raw basketball talent to work with there), and that doesn't even include DaMonte Williams.