I think this could be some interesting context to the whole history of consistently losing kids from Chicago.

Going back fifty years I've only found eleven Black players who came to Champaign-Urbana as a high school recruit from an out-of-state school north of the Mason-Dixon line. For these purposes I'm not considering the Luke Goodes or Richard Semraus as indicative of our ability to pull kids south. I'm not sure exactly where the cutoff line should be but I decided to include Cincinnati and Indianapolis but exclude Baltimore, though you could plausibly switch those around. There's less than a handful of instances of a player truly coming from an out-of-state urban area north of campus. Here's the list to decide for yourself:

Brandon Lee - Hillside, NJ (Newark)
Dra Gibbs-Lawhorn - Lafayette, IN
Ty Rodgers - Saginaw, MI
Sencire Harris - Canton, OH
Alan Griffin - Ossining, NY (Hudson River village)
Te'Jon Lucas - Milwaukee, WI
Jalen Coleman-Lands - Indianapolis, IN
Glynn Blackwell - Highland Park, MI (Detroit)
Curtis Taylor - Syracuse, NY
Anthony Welch - Grand Rapids, MI
Rich Adams - Cincinnati, OH

There are eleven more players who transferred to Illinois after starting college elsewhere so they can be added with an asterisk, though the factors that motivate a transfer are certainly different from a high school recruit:

Dain Dainja - Brooklyn Park, MN (Minneapolis)
Austin Hutcherson - New York, NY
Adonis De La Rosa - Bronx, NY
Kipper Nichols - Cleveland, OH
Mark Alstork - Dayton, OH
Khalid Lewis - Trenton, NJ
Alex Legion - Detroit, MI
Rodney Alexander - Benton Harbor, MI
Halim Abdullah - Jersey City, NJ
Rodney Jones - Philadelphia, PA
Craig Tucker - Flint, MI

I was relying on what was listed on Sports Reference and FI.com so I could be missing someone. It's notable just how infrequently we've pulled a player from a northern city and I've never seen it brought up before in discussions of Chicago kids likewise deciding not to come down to Champaign-Urbana.

Meanwhile, Illinois consistently has pulled players from Memphis, Missouri, Florida, Virginia, Texas, and occasionally the west coast.