You just proved the exact point everyone is making. Butch took 2 or 3 star kids and developed them. Yes recruiting was different, but those guys were not 4 and 5 star recruits. Kudos to Butch, your cousin, and the staff for finding them and coaching them up, but they weren’t heavily recruited guys that they had to beat the top teams to get.
Allow me to make a very simple point. There were no 2/3 star kids or 4/5 star kids back then, because there was no formal recruiting service that gave those rankings. There may have been one local writer somewhere who attempted it, but the player bios back then said "Parade All-American" or "First Team All County". I understand your point about "heavily recruited" though, and there is some merit to that. But all of our "2021 perceptions" about 1990s era recruits is just projection, there actually were no rankings back then.
I think one thing that has changed, over time, is that the SIZE of the "heavily recruited" group has grown. In the 80s and 90s, the "Parade All-Americans" were heavily recruited, or Texas schools would fight over Texas kids, but there were a lot of kids WHO BY TODAY'S RANKING STANDARDS would probably get low 4-star or high 3-star ratings, but who would not get a pile of recruiting letters. And schools that thought they had found a diamond in the rough would try to keep those kids a "secret". In today's world, those same diamonds would probably post their offer letters, and the websites would report it and upload highlight videos, and the next thing you know some formerly lightly-recruited kid from Tinytown USA would be getting offers from Alabama and Clemson and Ohio Taint.
****, you can even see modern day comparative situations. There was a recent article about how the Milwaukee Bucks were able to get a workout with Giannis and were blown away, but they tried to keep everything quiet so that he could fall to their spot in the draft. In this modern age, it's amazing that can still happen, but I think it is a much more rare fluke today.
The reason why I don't "discount" Butch's recruiting has nothing to do with whether we "beat the top teams to get those guys", but because Butch had to recruit those kids to Miami "against Miami's reputation", so to speak. We were on probation, we had scholarship sanctions, most of Butch's assistants were not very well-known, we had "crappy facilities" (or so the other schools told everyone), we played in a crappy conference, etc. etc. etc. And while Butch might not have had to recruit those kids away from other top programs, he still had to convince them to come to a Miami that was being dirty-recruited by every other program in the country. Never forget how Chucky Amato sent newspaper clippings about the Marlin Barnes murder to Lavar Arrington.
I do agree that this current DB recruiting class has a lot of accolades that pre-internet recruiting classes did not have. Talent comparisons? Who knows. Coaching development? Yet to be seen. But it's a great start.
