You realize that you're both right, right?
Does UM have budget constraints relative to the likes of Alabama, Texas, El Ohio State*? Yes, no question, case closed. It does now, it did then.
Does UM have budget constraints relative to every program that had far better football facilities? Eh, no, not at all. It doesn't now, and it didn't then. The state of our facilities was deplorable and the result of conscious under-investment.
And make no mistake, UM had a serious Edifice Complex the past two decades; it chose to do the bare minimum for the football facilities, and often way in arrears. It was paying certain medical professionals college coaching salaries at the same time they were paying Shannon a day laborers wage.
I don't want to hear about all these theories of compartmentalized money. They're a hoax. There was and has always been more capital available than the school was willing to invest in football. It adopted the dead narrative that UM was some special place that was too talent rich to lose. It really road with that idea until Richt.
Richt for all of his faults, was finally the voice credible enough that they'd listen. All of a sudden there's money to pay coaches in the realm of top 15 teams, private planes for recruiting instead of bus passes, etc. That money wasn't found under a couch cushion, it was a question of willingness.
So both things are true, relative to top 5 to 10 budgets, there will always be a gap, but the gap between what we could spend and what we did, that was self-induced.