There are two completely different mindsets for both, and neither blueprint for success is applicable for the other, unless you're willing to concede one key point (and I'll get to that later).
Football recruiting can almost never achieve a quick turnaround, but it can achieve a quick turnaround at a position of need. That's what makes Martavious Lee so vital for us this year. He's immediately turned a weak (or at least unproven) link on offense at WR and made it a threat. And because so much of football's success is based on timing and cohesiveness (not to mention physical maturity), you can bring in the entire Rivals Top 100 to fill a team, and it will flirt with bowl eligibility far more often than it will a conference championship.
Basketball recruiting can achieve a quick fix, and if you're a program designed on achieving greatness, you need to be able to deliver such a year in recruiting once in a while. Everyone likes to bring up that even the great Majerus went 14-14, but he followed that up with one of the greatest recruiting classes in Utah history.
Dominance in football is based on your ability to take young talent and develop them into star players or starters by their junior/senior years, then plug in parts as they accrue to graduation. But if we want Utah basketball to ever reach the heights we did in the 1990s under Majerus (or even the Pimm years), we have to get top talent that can perform immediately.
Every great Utah team from Majerus on back had a player on it who was immediate impact and a future, no-doubt-about-it all-MWC/WAC player (or POY candidate) from Day 1. In recent times, it went from Josh Grant to KVH to Andre Miller to Bogut.
If we are to settle for anything less, then the best we can ever hope for is one-year bursts with experienced teams that have grown into the role of being expected to perform at a high level.
Is winning a conference title once every 3-4 years good enough for Utah basketball. That's not for me to ultimately judge, but I feel many here (myself included) would feel short-changed in the deal. It would represent a clear fall from the Gardner-Pimm-Majerus standard.
Often times, I hear about the "right way to build a program." Well, that's changed. There's only one way in basketball to build a big-time winning program -- by landing above-average/superior talent that performs to a high standard immediately on a consistent basis. Everything else, short of NCAA rules (and to a lesser degree, player eligibility), is immaterial.
Until we start landing better players, the best we can hope for is for our most experienced teams (like last year) to win titles. If you are OK with that, then the football model of recruiting works well to suit your expectations as a fan.
But then you'll start over again the following year. That's certainly not a way to build a program, and certainly not what Utah's hoops history deserves.
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