I have a long history of always hating the corches and always blaming everything on them, but honest to fuck the entire paradigm of recruiting has changed. It is not as easy as saying "sell them" and "winners win" now. That isn't an excuse. It's reality. You absolutely MUST have an AD that encourages a robust and competitive NIL program, or you can have the best recruiters ever and you are never going to be top of conference. Now you have to be great recruiters AND have a well oiled payoff machine via NIL. I fear we are never going to know how good Boner and his corches are because he is never going to be backed by a strong pay to play NIL program. So, back of the bus while Ramming and Cohen trade recipes for bar cookies.
TL;DR: Boner is a one armed man in a paperhanging contest without NIL.
A week or two ago, somebody here finally found the decade+ old "Meet the Bagman" Grantland article and posted a link. A 5* QB or DE has been getting decently high six-figures for a looooooong time. My anal-Isis of NIL is and has been that it changes very little at the pointy end of dirty recruiting: The schools that are excelling in the NIL era are also the schools that excelled before, as they had a well-oiled machine already in place. The only thing that changed is that a lot of it is now a tax write-off and can be made to appear legal.
So SEC and a few choice other schools, with their network of bagmen and/or billionaire beneficiaries, pretty much walked into NIL ready to go. What has[/i] seemingly changed under NIL is that other[/i] schools now have a quicker and more direct path to the second tier if they choose to take it. UW seems to have chosen a quasi-status-quo approach of just selling the opportunity and location and development and education, etc. That was a good second tier recruiting strategy pre-NIL, but it's third tier at best now, when clearly even a school like Arizona is throwing around cash.[/b]
Long story short, I think the mistake people keep making around here is that now[/i] it's no longer about "sales." I've been beating the drum forever that--at the pointy end, at least--it never was. It's about money and, to a lesser extent, winning. Always has been. Thinking that UW could have prevented Ohio State from taking their lunch money if they just had better salesmen on staff was as naive as believing that Jedd fucking Fisch just went to a sales seminar or something and suddenly learned how to reel 'em in to a one-win team.