I'm not saying recruiting doesn't need to be done years' out, I'm saying people (fans/recruits/coaches) need to temper their expectations.
Time is the most scarce resource, but make no mistake, man hours to identify, evaluate, and perform due diligence on recruits is the biggest disparity between UM's recruiting budget and schools like Alabaga. If UM has 15 people on staff working 50 hours a week solely on recruiting, that's 750 hours per week. If Alabaga has 45 staffers doing the same thing, that 2250 hours per week. At the end of the year (assuming fifty weeks worked by all), that's 112,500 man hours for recruiting for Alabaga vs. 37,500 man hours for Miami. That's a difference of 75K man hours.
And regardless of where those kids are located, you still need to do your due diligence as a staff. Identify potential talent. Evaluate that talent. Perform due diligence on the recruit (including investigating character, grades, family, etc...). That all takes time, and it is happening in various phases over multiple classes at once (and at the same time that coaches are working on developing the players currently on the roster and trying to win football games).
As far as the Butch comparison, I agree that he was our last truly dominant recruiter. Butch may have had one of the all-time best eyes for talent of any UM coach, and his track record developing that talent at UM was excellent. But I honestly do not believe he could have done it as easily in this era. Advances in the internet, data storage, social media, and telecommunications have made the physical distance from Tuscaloosa to Broward or Miami-Dade County less important than ever. Back in Butch's day, in-person evaluations during high school football games were the norm. Low definition video on a CD was available, too, if you were lucky. Today, you can have an entire season's worth of game film uploaded onto the cloud and downloaded in the time it takes to get a sandwich from Jimmy Johns. Technology has blunted the advantage of having "talent in your backyard" (especially if that "talent" has no loyalty to or love for the program).
There are literally thousands of "ranked" recruits in the 2019, 2020, and 2021 class (plus all of the unranked kids staffs need to do their due diligence on... because rankings change and aren't the end-all-be-all). Those kids (and classes) are all going to have more time allocated to them before 2022 (just like 2022 will have more time allocated than 2023). 2019 got checked off the list this past February. It's no coincidence that shortly thereafter, we all saw an uptick in 2021 kids getting evaluated and offered. When 2020 is signed, sealed, and delivered in February 2020, I'm sure we'll see a similar uptick in 2022 evaluations and offers. It's a question of prioritizing the nearer future over the more distant future, and allocating man hours to reflect that prioritization.
That's the game.