Same song, different verse. Football, baseball, basketball... it really doesn't matter because we're in the same boat with all of them.
Can't afford the elite and we're not getting any of the 4-star or upper tier 3-stars that LSU, Bama, UT, etc want, so we end up with a Top 30-40th ranked class that is good enough for 10th-12th in the SEC. Fast forward a year and half our 30th ranked class is gone, so we try to fill in the holes with some low budget transfers that none of the above mentioned schools wanted. Rinse, repeat...
If I sound miserable, I'm not. I just have enough awareness to realize that this is where we are with college sports, and our situations with NIL and overall athletic budget are not "fine". It may be better that it was 2-3 years ago, but the problem is that all the schools we're recruiting against are 10x better than 2-3 years ago. How do I know? Because every head coach on campus is repeatedly getting his/her *** handed to them on the recruiting trail aside from the occasional, rare exception when we pull in a hometown kid from a couple hours away.
The best we can hope for in virtually any sport at the moment is that we hire a coaching staff that can develop talent(like Mullen and maybe Jans?), and we somehow gather enough NIL to keep said talent + the coaches in Starkville. We are fighting an incredibly steep, uphill battle that I don't think 70% of our fanbase has accepted