Right?
I think a lot of us have been burned so badly over the past... oh, 30 or 40 years... that the idea we would be ahead in any ONE of these areas:
- offensive scheme
- paying players
- stacking the roster
- developing talent
- coaching staff hires
...is just completely alien to us.
The only one (and a half) we've ever had any advantage on among the above since I started following college ball was staff hires and DB/DT development; Mack Brown put together a really good staff in the mid-00's, even if it had some major flaws here and there.
You gotta go back to the DKR days when we had an offensive scheme advantage and (thanks to a lack of scholarship limits) stacking the roster. (I think there's a possibility we'll be able to do this with NIL, too. I like the direction we're going in with it, and I'm grateful the guys behind Texas One seem to know what they're doing.)
I can't really judge player development so well. We had GREAT DL development under Mack Brown, for sure; you knew if we recruited a blue chip, he'd be great.
But pickings in the WR room have been thin for a long time, and even when we had talent under Mack, only one of those guys (McGarity) showed up to the NFL ready to play.
Just saying... it takes time for people to get their heads around How Things Are Now. CTJ's telling us the same things about our team he was last off-season (i.e. "People who I know who are NEVER high on the team have turned into slobbering golden retrievers over our players") and I'm still struggling with the idea.