What are you trying to convince people to believe, and even if you get people to side with you, to what end? I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to understand your point and the goal of your posts.
To sum it up I think the fact that the wholesale destruction of Illinois Basketball was so narratively tied into our high-profile failures with individual big time recruits that what's left of the fanbase has developed a savior complex by which the only path back to our former prominence is essentially to redeem those specific failures, to have highly recruited in-state guys step into the void left by the Shaun Livingston's and the Jon Scheyer's. Almost a religious narrative, that our faith during our time in the wilderness will be repaid by this specific sort of salvation.
And I just think it's total nonsense. The correlation between recruiting rankings and wins is so much looser than the narrative here suggests, especially within the part of the talent curve Illinois shops in, and we've underperformed our talent level every single season since 2009.
I believe that you become a consistently good program, in both football and basketball, by defining a style of play and a long-range plan to achieve it through recruiting to fit and coaching for skill development and execution and just building it brick-by-brick, practice-by-practice, game-by-game.
I think the rush to demolish the inherited rosters in both programs was horribly misguided and should be consciously avoided in the future, but I see one side of Kirby methodically reconstructing out of those ashes and I see the other side flailing around blindly.
But regardless, if we're ever getting back to respectability, it is going to happen in games, or really with games revealing what has actually happened in practice, with our players just developing and executing better and being better deployed and better schemed and just lifting themselves out of the fog of suckitude. It's not going to be the Basketball Gods taking pity on our plight and allocating us a better ration of Talent Units.
Want to move this program in the right direction? Go out and play better! Unfortunately, our roster as it stands is so horribly imbalanced it just doesn't look like it's gonna give us much of a chance.