It seems like 'buying first stage engines from Russia' will have a hard time undercutting the 'reuse the first stage entirely' strategy, no?
It's certainly not obviously more efficient or quicker reuse, it's likely to be slower and far more costly if they actually do manage it, so saying it is more efficient is just a way for ULA to try to sound like they are still a contender, even out their launches are still significantly more expensive and they haven't even tried to reuse engines.
Also, they're at totally different places along the technological readiness curve. They're proposing a theoretical concept, SpaceX has already recovered two first stages. Even if their parachute concept was theoretically superior (which I don't think it is) by the time they got it working, SpaceX would have years of operational experience with hoverslam.