There are 3 routes in today's recruiting landscape for Texas to go, now that the SEC has fully invaded the state with a flood of money and corruption, led by and thanks to the mouthbreathing shit heels in College Station.
1) Georgia/Tenn/ATM route - straight-up slinging money overtly to recruits, handlers, and families. This works on some level, but there are families and recruits that aren't going to be wowed solely by $50k-$200k, depending upon the recruit. This angle also involves character risk.
2) Bama/USC/Ohio State - do the deals when you have to do them, but don't sacrifice for character and fall back on being a blue blood with a ton of advantages and the longer game for recruits once their career is over. Cherry-pick the portal as you deem appropriate. (Please don't insult this board's intelligence with some pedantic take involving recency bias about why USC shouldn't be listed here, this is who they historically are.)
3) Oklahoma/Iowa State - find your guys and get them every time, avoid the full-blown auctions because they're not worth your time due to the character/culture clash they usually bring to the lunchpail business. Play the portal to your advantage and build classes with it in mind.
4) Texas/Notre Dame/Michigan - be a patrician dipshit without an apparatus for getting guys you need, claim piety, and roll with whoever your blue blood status still enables you to land. This is no longer an option in this state and this has been abandoned by the staff.
It appears that the staff is going to go the route of option 2. It is going to be interesting to see what happens in the clash between that route and the dipshits in-state and invading the state with option 1. NIL's arrival cannot get here soon enough.
Bear Alexander and his handler are overtly running an auction for visits, commits, and ink. It will finish in the 6 figures for a player that already shows flakiness with transfers and character issues inherent with the behavior I just described. There's a reason Bama isn't pushing for a guy like this. He's a mercenary with risk all over him. Texas will be foolish to even host him on campus at all from here forward.
Things went well this past weekend, but let's see who all is wowed by straight bankroll and who isn't. I expect Texas to land a stud class, but the DB end can hurt. Brooks is going to sign with Bama. ATM is throwing money at the problem. Texas needs to sign Allen, Anderson, Guilbeau and Harris. A whiff on most of them will suck because they're all elite in some form. I expect Texas to be fine and figure it out.
This is a big cycle for all kinds of reasons, and it will tell us a lot about this staff's ability to get things done when they need to while still finding their guys who love football and may or may not be 5 stars, but develop either way into animals.
Could do more but got to get back to legit work. Sorry for typos, I'll proofread and edit this stream of consciousness later.