I would look into the number and quality of recruits we had from Texas during our time in the Big 12. I don’t think it was a fruitful as you are making it out to be. Without a Big Ten team in the state, Rhule has made tremendous headway in Texas by just putting forth the effort to recruit there.Stability of the program should have been a higher priority than stability of the conference. Tom was short sided in this move. He damaged the program severely, although he didn't intend to.
You forget, we lost our Texas recruiting pool.. that's another very big part of it. Even with a high level of recruiting effort by all of the coaching staffs, we have really struggled to get top tier talent here and that hasn't changed since we came to this conference.. It also affected Bo's teams as his recruiting went down hill after the move as well.
The big issue is we basically killed the golden goose, under the guise of seeking stability.
In my view, the only way to fix that, is to undue what we have done.
The only positive realignment has had lately, is the addition of California & Washington as new recruiting pools.. we need to make that a priority imo. We have had very little luck tapping into the Ohio and Michigan talent pools, but I still wouldn't trade them for the old Texas pipelines.
IMHO whatever pipeline there was to Texas was lost during the Pelini years when recruiting in general was an after thought, especially toward the end of his tenure. .