Iowa is a small school in the middle of nowhere. We have no, or almost no, media presence. The weather is terrible. Part of that is terrible PR practices and part of its just geography.
The structures that would allow Iowa to lift our profile is strongly invested in the status quo, not Iowa. If your league has a media dependent revenue stream, and that's all P5 campuses, do you want the 2.5 million audience for a Michigan broadcast or the 250,000 Iowa audience? The dominant and all dominating imperative of institutions is institutional preservation. The TV/streaming services can read a demographic chart, they know from whence the clicks and hits are coming.
So the media investment is in the big draw programs the media promotes. Those programs benefit enormously from that media investment in recruiting, making it much harder for the non media schools to recruit 4 and 5 star caliber players. If you're Iowa, you make your problem worse by overly restrictive academic and citizenship expectations that freaks out over every trivial **** up, OWI, public intox, etc.... Other schools, like the Clones or Nebraska will take a guy if he's done some armed robbery if the kid has game or cannot read (e.g. the Davis brothers).
So, even when Iowa is good, and we have been most of the last 8 years, it is still very hard to get a lot of top hundred players, although right now Luka, both McCs, and Joe W are all top 100 players. Jordan and Joe T were top 120 4*s so our current group is a well recruited team and, not unexpectedly, have won a lot of games the last couple of seasons and are getting unusual media attention because of Luka. The 2021 class is small, I don't see more than one kid in the spring, and the kid we signed has a little recruiting profile, top 200 for sure and probably higher (247 average is 163 I believe). But the next class will be pretty significant and the absence of at least 1 4*/top 100 player will be significant, in a bad way.
www.univstats.com
