Without buying the lead, I think the answer is quite clearly a hard no.
Illinois has 24 players on NFL rosters right now. That's a staggering total for a program that has generated one winning record since 2011 (my frigging God). At least said winning season was two years. ago. Just a random comparison to other programs of interest.
Maryland - 15
Indiana - 6
Northwestern - 9
MSU - 14
Wisconsin - 26
Iowa - 27
Texas - 32
Texas A&M - 28
TCU - 18
Texas Tech - 8
Iowa State - 12
Arkansas - 15
Mizzou - 12
I'm sorry, I don't think there's any reasonable narrative that Illinois hasn't brought a good amount of talent through its program. And while 2024 might be at the high end, this phenomenon isn't new; Illinois has been producing far more NFL talent relevant to its college win totals for 25 years now.
There are some interesting questions on this. First, why does Illinois outkick its recruiting rankings in generating NFL players? Looking at that list, Iowa and Wisconsin - obviously much bigger winners than us - have done the same. I think there might be a decent argument of some regional bias against ranking the kids from the BTW territory as high as they deserve. All these schools are generating NFL players at a pretty high level, and they use at least similar recruiting pools. Second, there may be a bit of a chicken/egg problem with high 2 and 3 star recruits (I think the services do a pretty good job of grading out the best athletes), but we may be seeing the "average" P5 prospect's ranking more reflecting his college choice/offer list than a pure talent evaluation (whereas the 4/5 star types tend to just jump out as high upside guys who are potentially NFL players half a decade down the line).
The other question is depth. Lots of people think: "Illinois lacks the depth of other programs." It's possible, I suppose, tho the fact that this phenomenon is 25 or so years old makes me doubt that Illinois has (a) 20 really good players in the program and beneath that (b) 60 or so guys that shouldn't be at the P5 level. For most schools, it sure seems that having 20 really good guys there means the bottom half of your roster is better than most rosters which only have 10 really good players. That would be a more normal statistical distribution and Illinois' continued beating of the NFL odds counsels against the continued belief that it has some odd roster situation with a huge gulf between its most talent 25% and the other 75%. I am a little more open to the idea that Illinois lacks the depth of the Iowas and Wisconsins for a variety of reasons, but there's no reason to think we don't have more depth than the NWs and IUs. This metric should indicate we don't have bottom tier depth.
I don't want to go too far down the reasons for the above speculation, but I really just don't see how the issue at Illinois for the past 25 years hasn't been primarily bad HFCs and secondarily low level QB play. I said this recently, since Mackovic left Champaign, Illinois has never hired a HFC who left us and later went on to succeed anywhere else, even in a coordinator role. No one has hired like we have, worst P5 hiring in the country for 30 years. Even better, we've rarely had a coordinator go onto future success elsewhere. I think Mike Locksley has done this (after a rough stint at New Mexico), but to be frank I think Mike Locksley was the best play caller Illinois has had since maybe Greg Landry (I like but don't love our current OC, think he's by far the bright spot in our current staff). No shock he's a decent P5 HC I suppose.
