You have to give McGuff credit for going to the championship game this past season in the Big 10. But he should do a better job with getting kids from Ohio. But it's not always easy. Maryland do not get a lot of kids from Maryland. They missed out on good players like Bella Alarie, Jakia Brown-Turner and Saylor Poffenberger. And i didn't even mention poor Virginia. Virginia rarely gets the top players in their state.
The team definitely overachieved in the Big Ten tournament, which was surprising. But when he's the highest paid Big Ten coach (almost 300,000 more than his predecessor Foster's base salary) and one of the identified reasons Foster was let go was because of his failures in in-state recruiting [and lack of post season success] and he hasn't proven to be better at either.
Foster missed out on some top Ohio high school players, who had varying levels of success in college (Top 20 players in high school Shay Selby, Amber Gray, Cierra Bravard [all-ACC], Natasha Howard [finished 6th in the NCAA for field goal %], Malina Howard, Samarie Walker) So far McGuff has had less success with in-State recruiting (some Top 100 players and bolded top 20 such as
Zia Cooke,
Jordan Horston,
Kathryn and Maddie Westbeld, Valencia Myers, Taylor Mikesell, Naz Hillman, Abby Prohaska,
Bree Hall, Leila Phelia, Sakima Walker, Shyanne Sellers) and now isn't on KK's top 12 and have zero top 100 recruits in 2021. I know every person has their own reasons for not going to Ohio State (Cooke wanted to play for Dawn, Leila and Naz may be from UM Families, Academics are more important) Also, somewhere in there someone missed out on Columbus Northland's Alexis Peterson in 2013. But I'd say not making the top 12 for a top in-state player is worse than making the top 3 and losing out. Especially if you can't keep your top recruits for more than two seasons (Crooms, Bell, McCoy, Lewis | Pugh, Caretti, Ekhelar, Satterfield, Wone weren't big losses but when you're short on players). McGuff just isn't trending the correct direction with recruits, which doesn't help with his "coaching".