Sorry, man, but the "Strong got shot down on his OC offers" premise is bullshit, flatly. He half-assed a search and waited long enough to justify bringing in Watson.
Frankly, I disagree with your general premise about the money-whipping issue. We haven't even attempted it enough in our lifetimes to take the position that it's not enough to get people to Texas. That's also just bullshit. I wish we'd tried it way more often. Mack Brown was able to get people by money-whipping them repeatedly, by the way. Robinson, Muschamp, Chizik, Diaz, Harsin. They were all first choices and paid way above prior salary levels to come here. It works just fine, just like at every other big program, when there's a hope or belief that the guy in charge isn't a fucking imbecile or dead man walking.
Nahlin is always impressive when it comes to ignoring actual facts and data points and pressing forward with his own bullshit narrative. He was straight up fucking wrong on Golding. He manufactured that premise out of whole cloth and got others to bite on it. It had the stench of his worst traits from the jump.
The same is exactly true with his "Milwee sucks at recruiting" premise. He's pushing that out there and others are picking it up as fact, and there is literally no truth to it. Nahlin doesn't know a motherfucking thing about Milwee's recruiting prowess and he can't just shut the fuck up about it and admit it. Just let it play out and then create judgment against performance. Nope, he's got to let everyone know ahead of time that he, in fact, knows. Well, he doesn't.
Nahlin didn't fucking follow Milwee's recruiting at Akron. I am not going to be surprised when his dumbass attempts to claim he did, or that "he spoke to someone close to the Akron program while Milwee was there", but neither concept is, or will be, true. That's pure fiction.
At Alabama, I'm fucking closer to people there than he is, and they don't really know much about Milwee's recruiting either. He's doggedly energetic on evaluations and enjoys interacting with targets, which are great signs. But he was a fucking analyst at Bama, so how much beyond the halo effect of being there can he get credit for? On the flip, there isn't a soul there that doesn't think he can recruit.
He was literally the first guy picked to join a staff by two solid offensive minds in Butch Jones and Steve Sarkisian. That flies in the fucking face of the idea that he can't recruit or doesn't know how to do so. Anyone carrying Nahlin's water here on this one will get negged every time by me, and I hope the other recruitniks. If Milwee turns out to be a shit recruiter, fine, we'll all see it, but there is zero foundation in that now and it is fucking board noise from an easy liar when it suits him.