if we lived in or next to Texas, Florida, or California, I would have been disappointed with the class. But we don’t live in fertile recruiting territory and, in comparison to every peer school in competition for our recruits, we have not only not been a good football team this millennium, we have been atrocious.
To put things in perspective, in basketball, you can recruit an Ayo or kofi and be good. In football you need 40 - 50 comparably talented players that fit a system, to account for injuries. Add to it that for basketball, Chicago has the most talented recruiting base in the nation. If Illinois, ever in its history, had pulled its own in-state talent consistently, we would have won at least a dozen national championships. But we haven't pulled the talent and we rarely even qualify for final fours. For perspective 54 Illinois players played in the NCAA tournament last year, none went to Illinois.
Despite the missed in-state talent, in Basketball, for some reason, making the tournament seems to be sufficient for most fans. But in football, which we have almost never been consistently good during the bowl era, the expectation is 10 win seasons.
we aren’t and won’t be competing for loads of top end talent. We are competing for talent that wins 6 games. Once we have done that, we will see a natural uptick in recruiting.
We will have the talent to win bowl games in this class. we have the talent to win bowl games in the last class. We won some big recruitments with very talented players. Not Alabama talented, but rather with 8 or 9 win season talented. That’s how football recruiting works. It is a border state game and we don’t border the top states.
Winning back to back bowl games, in Illinois history, is almost unheard of. I recommend recalibration expectations until we do that. I think starting to expect us to qualify for bowls almost yearly is the direction we are headed. This has not been done by many coaches (maybe 1 coach) In the bowl era of college football