I know you know this, but those recruitments are the most vicious and heated recruitments out of any. Everybody needs them, especially teams with high aspirations, and there's not enough of them to go around.
My burnt orange brain assumes that we'll fight dirty, but not quite as dirty as everyone else. That we'll focus on our NIL, rather than bags, and talking up our program, rather than tearing down other programs. I'm sure we negative recruit, I just don't think we do it to the degree necessary. I'm probably being naïve, but that seems to be Sark's style and the style he wants his staff to adopt. I'm sure Coach Bo knows what buttons to push, he's been doing this long enough, but the strategy is being set by Sark.
With this McKinley specifically, I'm wondering if LSU, Texas, and OU didn't knock each other out of it. A&M wasn't really on the radar, and maybe the front runners tore each other down to the point that it gave A&M a chance to slide back in late. I obviously don't have any inside information, but they may have been able to play up the church angle because no one thought enough of their chances to point out all the moral failings of that program.