There's a fundamental asymmetry to losing a NIL recruitment vs. winning one. You have to outspend many schools to win a recruitment, but it takes just one school outspending you to lose a recruitment. For Edwards it was A&M. For Bowman it was USC. For Lott it will be Oregon. For Atkinson it will be Georgia. We can certainly pride ourselves on not overspending, but whether we finish in 2nd place for a recruit or whether we never even pursue the end result is still the same.
 
	Yes, you can say A&M/USC/Oregon/Georgia/Ohio State are stupid for overspending and that we'll ultimately benefit. But teams can now pick and choose which recruits to overspend on, knowing that the House settlement has freed up a lot of additional funding and scholarship limits are much looser. For each of them it's one recruitment won, with a decreased chance of winning future recruitments that we or other unaffected schools may or may not be involved in. But for us it's already four big recruitments lost and counting. We're trading concrete, known losses for the hope of nebulous, hypothetical future recruiting wins.