It's been a pretty long time ago (in internet years), but there was a news reporting agency that conducted a study (good luck finding a link). They followed a half dozen teams or so (iirc), and on average, only 39 guys played meaningful minutes through the course of the season. I'll reverse engineer that into meaning you'll need about 40 players if you want good depth.
If on average your soph, jr, and sr classes each contribute 12 players and you make up the balance with fr/redshirtfr, then you'll get your 40. Repeat every year and you'll have a sustainable program. Of course this is a silly strawman, but it serves it's purpose to illustrate.
So what happens if you waltz into December and/or January with 14 or 15 recruits committed. The guys you really wanted, that you studied and ranked, now you need 12 out of 14 or 15 to hit. Or rely on the leavings of CFB recruiting still available the last week before signing day. This is the very problem with Pelini's recruiting in my eyes. You might have classes where you have more hits, more misses. But in the end it will balance out and you won't have enough hits to provide depth.
The current staff looks to have the recruiting machine in place. They tried shooting for the moon, and it's a learning opportunity. I still fully expect that we'll get some of the guys off our list, but we'll still be late fishing in a fished out lake to fill out the class.
To me this is where we can help our program. Take some "good" guys in June, so we're not fishing in January. And no, I'm not talking about filling out the roster with June players, leave room for some hat guys, leave some room for the blue chippers highly interested in us.
Michigan may have 10 guys they want, but they're not getting their 10. OhSU may have 10 guys they want, but they're not getting their 10. And NU has 10 guys we want, well, we're not getting all our 10 either.