I disagree with this. You still need an elite recruiter in order to be in the final choices for a recruit. Money may have leveled the playing field some, but it’s still not the NFL where it’s the only real factor.
College football programs need solid recruiters to ensure they are in the final running for the players you want. Players get offers from 40-50 schools, so it’s not simply a bidding war. They do build connections with certain schools, they feel a pull toward particular coaches, and then they narrow it down to a handful. Then those remaining schools return the love, but also have to be able to back it up with the NIL.
Those two things go hand-in-hand. If you don’t have the NIL, you’re screwed, and if you can’t recruit effectively and sell your program, you’re screwed. At the same time, a huge part of recruiting is finding the right players to fit what you need in your system, so that evaluation is not as simple as having an NIL budget.
Now where exactly Mario is on the scale of recruiter is a whole separate conversation that we could debate to death, but I do not think NIL lessens the recruiting advantage we have with Mario. In fact, in certain ways, it’s the opposite.
Regarding Lane v. Mario here, I don’t know that anyone else in the CFB world sees an advantage if one over the other, provided that Land is at an SEC school and Mario is here at Miami.