Bielema made the pitch when he was hired, and he is following through.
It is no secret that Bielema is hitting recruiting the state of Illinois hard. And those checks are cashing. The 2023 class will be proof.
Let's look at the history of the state of Illinois and its top-50 recruits. In my analysis, I do make an assumption for sake of argument, which I’ll explain later.
The yellow boxes show teams that recruited from the state of Illinois at or above the number of players Illinois signed in that year.
The orange boxes show the percentage of players that Illinois had from the state of Illinois in a recruiting class.