People are dogpiling you - and rightfully so - but I'd rather light a candle than curse your darkness.
You have correctly identified a problem - that you have to outbid many schools to win an NIL auction, and if we are committed to sticking at what we perceive to be "market price" then it only takes one school who is willing to pay above market to win the recruitment. That is logical, I will give you that. But you're forgetting some factors:
1. We are setting the market in June. What happens in December when we still have money at our disposal and decide to reset the market? Will that one school who outbid us be able to do so again? Will they be able to win a bidding war once we know our financial constraints and decide to go above market?
2. We are willing to go above market. We have been for several years now. Justus Terry, Colin Simmons, Ryan Wingo...etc. etc. etc. When a guy comes along who is a "must get," we aren't getting outbid by anyone except maybe Oregon. There are some guys for whom the market price doesn't have an upper limit.
3. There are tangible and obvious benefits to forcing your competitors to commit their limit resources to winning battles. I'm sure you've heard the expression Pyrrhic victory. If they have to overpay for guys we want but don't need, they have less resources to throw at a guy we need. Picking and choosing those battles is part of an overall recruiting strategy and Sark / the staff have shown they're very good at developing strategy in addition to being good at making the tactical decisions required to win individual recruitments.
Losing recruits like Edwards, Bowman, and Lott sucks. But we've only lost them for now. And if the staff thinks we need those guys then they'll back up the brinks. But they can't buy everyone and we're clearly committing resources to winning more important battles. We'll circle back around to those guys later if we can.
And, as other people have readily pointed out, it's June. There's still a lot of time left to close ground. Especially if we continue to kick ass and teams like USC and A&M continue to step on rakes.