When Butch was coach, our dominant teams from the 80's and 90's were still fresh in people's minds.
It would have been a lot easier for Butch to recruit at Miami, just because at that time, the memory was still there of when we ruled college football for nearly 2 decades.
It's harder today. We haven't been relevant since 2003 or so. And as great as the 2001 team was, it didn't totally turn college football on its head, like our great teams of the 80's/90's did. Those teams were a marketing phenomenon.
This is why I keep saying - if Miami wants to be "back," we need to follow the blueprint from the 80's, not from the 2000 team. We can never recruit the kind of talent we did in 2000. What we can do is build a team like Howard did, and then Jimmy.
But we're so far away from that mindset today, I just don't see it in our future.