I know people will throw at me all the extenuating circumstances, none of which I doubt I haven’t already thought of, but so far we are missing the key tell-tale evidence that we are getting great recruiting. Other than the class rankings and stars by names, which have been known to be wrong.
When something like this happens to other teams it is always said that they do less with more, or that they are wasting talent, etc etc.
You're looking at the overall picture which isn't just recruiting but also development, preparation, scheme, etc etc. All those things are important and failure in any of them can lead to overall bad outcomes, but it doesn't mean every single aspect was bad.
For instance, nobody is going to look back at our 2017 basketball class and claim it was a great recruiting job. We took two three stars with decent offer sheets and two reaches. However it produced for us an ACC PoY and ACC DpoY which is probably better than the vast majority of classes we've had. But that doesn't change the recruiting aspect of that class, it just speaks to the development of it. The opposite can be said, to a large extent, about our 2009 class. It largely underperformed given the overall standing, but nobody is going to chalk it up to a weakness in recruiting.
Collins is a better recruiter than we've had at HC in a long time and has at least shown that we don't need to buy into the "we'll never compete recruiting so why even try" arguments that we saw at times. His failures in other areas don't change that though.