Apples and Oranges

Trying to compare Football recruiting to Women's/Men's basketball recruiting is an exercise in futility. The class sizes and teams are so different that it's almost impossible to correlate the programs. Comparing Men's basketball to Women's basketball recruiting would be a lot more accurate.

As an example:

For those that say that they believe that NI is a superior recruiter than Marcus, they will point out the many top players that have played for NDWBB throughout the years, including many stars that are playing at the next level. Also, the great players on the current roster that will soon be in the WNBA if they choose to do that after graduation. When adding in the portal recruiting, NI has done a good job and excels in recruiting.
If you are in Marcus Freeman's corner, you can debate the recruiting rules. Sure NI recruited some awesome talent over the years but, that was as an assistant to Muffet. It's easier to recruit top tier talent for a Hall of Fame coach when that coach has laid the groundwork and has yearly National Championship expectations each season. Recruiting, when YOU are the face of a rebuilding team isn't that easy. Besides, even as a Defensive Coordinator, Marcus did as good as a job as he did with bringing in better recruits even with the disadvantages of having Brian Kelly as his head coach. If you want to judge recruiting by what has happened as Head Coaches, Marcus believers will say that he has more than doubled the better recruits than his predecessor as opposed to NI which has only signed 4 players (including Emma) in 3 years.

I don't think that it is fair to say either way because of the circumstances and needs of each program. I am just thankful that we can have such debates because that means that we have 2 coaches that look to excel at recruiting. Whether this translates to Championships or not remains to be seen. All I know is that there are hundreds of other schools that would love to have this debate.