Lulz. I read that and thought it was mostly bullshit.
There was a lot of aggy-esque sunshine pumping in there. IT says just about all of our recruits are underrated pretty much every year. The article also makes it sound like Herman's first choice was to take 3 stars and coach them up while ignoring the fact that most of the 3 stars we have taken the last two years are due to missing out on higher rated guys the staff prioritized first. The staff did a great job mitigating their misses last year, and I like our class and tend to think most those guys are underrated except for Coburn and Carson. I'm not as high on this year's class so far. Sweat and Carter (assuming he's in) should be 3 stars. They're solid players but don't have very high ceilings from what I can see (and their offer list echoes that). Mpagi is underrated, and I expect his rating will rise with a strong senior year.
Regarding your data on tOSU, I have no idea where you got your numbers, but they're way off and entirely misleading. Urb's 2 first full classes were 2013 and 2014. He took 6 DEs (including Hubbard who was listed at ATH but played DE) for an avg of 91.38. This included first-round pick Joey Bosa in 2013, who is a similar size and rating to the #1 target we just missed on in Leal. Weighing down that number were 2 3-stars Urb took in 2014. Both barely played and ended up transferring. For DT, he took 3 guys with an average of 91.45. For UT, you said we only took one DT but we've taken 2: Ojomo and Coburn. So for DE, it's 5 guys with an avg of 88.13 and 2 DTs with an avg of 91.76. tOSU's total DL average was: 91.40. UT's total DL avg over 2 years: 89.16. Further, only 2/7 of UT's commits were 4 stars. For tOSU, 7/9 were 4 stars and the only ones who actually contributed were 4 stars. All this also glosses over the fact that tOSU had 2 5 star DEs in their 2012 class and another DE who was #92 overall. Point being, Urban recruited significantly better on the DL his first two years, and the talent he's utilized to get to where he's at now with tOSU is much better than the talent Herman and Co. will have to utilize for the next few years. Your comp to tOSU doesn't hold up at all.
I don't understand why people either completely deny bad news or get irrationally angry and upset when confronted with it, whether it's that Herman made some big mistakes in his initial hires with guys like Mehringer, Warehime, and Beck, or that DL recruiting has some issues and is lagging behind this staff's recruiting at pretty much every other position. The 2018 DL class was good, but it wasn't the staff's Plan A like IT is trying to say, and it's not sustainable to do it that way every year. 2019 is shaping up to be worse than 2018, unless we find 2 Ojomo's in this class or a big time recruitment takes a major turn. All these things can be overcome and no one's saying that we're doomed and Herman will be a definite failure, but they're also fair to point out. There is no doubt in my mind the offensive hires lost us at least two games last year (there were 3 games alone where our O couldn't' score than 10 in regulation), which is negatively affecting our 2019 recruiting and will negatively affect our 2020 recruiting, unless we turn it around this year, which I'm not super optimistic about since Beck is still the OC and all three offenders are still on staff, not to mention the opportunity cost of wasting 3 coaching spots on TE and WR when we could (and should) be using at least one of those spots to help out DL recruiting. Anyways, I like Herman and I'm hopeful he can be a good coach at UT, but he absolutely under performed on the field last year and there are things he needs to fix in the program. It shouldn't be that hard to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time.
Anyways, these conversations are probably gonna keep coming up ad nauseum while things are slow, my work is picking up, and I waste way too much got dam time on this site, so I'll be signing off for a while. Have a fun dead period y'all!