My point being I think that a really good coach can do amazing things with pretty minimal talent - there are more good coaches than their used to be so perhaps it is a little harder, but Jeff took a team with little 'ranked' HS talent to the FF twice, Dawn built something interesting enough (having her one highly ranked recruit transfer out after her freshman year) to start attracting other really highly ranked players, Princeton made some serious noise last year with little or no top 100 players. It took only a couple of years for TX to recover from the disaster that was GG (and I'm not sold on the coach, yet, but the school and the region are great for athletics.)
There is enough talent around to compete quickly for conference championships - to challenge in the AAC?, not the last few years, but do any of the P5 conference champions look that formidable - ND, SC, and Baylor are very good but they are not goliaths - Maryland is a two time FF team but unlikely to win the B10 this year, and who knows who the best team in the Pac10 really is.