Would you rather have BU out on the recruiting trail or in CU trying to get a bunch of freshman up to speed so they can compete in the B1G? The fact of the matter is that most of the posts on here are unreasonable and petty. Does BU need to do better - yes, and at a lot more than recruiting Chicago. All this article shows me is that BU has his priorities straight. Recruiting the class of 2020 in Chicago is not the major issue he faces - winning basketball games so a recruit might actually want to play for ILL is.
Two things are different now compared to when Bill Self was here: (1) Self inherited a team loaded with young talent and did not have to rebuild, so he had the luxury of time to focus on recruiting for the future, and (2) the world was a lot bigger place and location played a much larger role in choice of school making it easier to recruit the Illinois kids. Is there any great teams built on local kids today - don't really know the answer to this, but I doubt Kentucky has a lot of Kentucky kids or Duke has a lot of NC kids or Kansas a lot of Kansas kids. Just who is predominantly recruiting from their own state to regularly build a quality program? There may be a few, but I am not sure who they are.
Probably should have looked at number of starters, but the overall number of homestate players on the rosters including walkons in the B1G is as follows: IN:6, MI:7, WI:4, MS:10, OSU:5, MN:7, MD:6, NE:4, PD:5, IA:9, NW:4, PS:6, RU:3, IL:7. It looks like Michigan State is the one team that can claim to be homegrown, but 5 of its 8 major contributors are from out of state. For Michigan 6 of top 7 contributors are from out of state, including top 5 scorers. Iowa may actually be closest but 3 of top 6 contributors including top 2 scorers are from out of state. Finally, our most comparable competitor is maybe Indiana, and only 2 starters and 4 of their top 10 contributors are from IN. The fact is that recruiting in state is not typical and not critical to success today. The idea that UI has or needs some special relationship with Chicago to succeed is antiquated, and to direct a disproportionate amount of effort to Chicago would be counterproductive.