Big 12 teams prove successful, even with dismal recruiting classes?

[wallycock]

.... that is dismal by the standards we expect as a competitive SEC team. Just out of curiosity, I researched TCU's recruiting class ranking from 2010-2014 (5 years) (according to Rivals). During this period their final class rankings were between 30 - 50 with #30 obviously their best. They had no 5-stars, and only 10 4-stars over this 5 year period. Their team has been built with almost exclusively 3-star players. Less than 10% of their entire recruiting classes were 4-star players, so it isn't all about having the biggest star count when recruiting. Having said all of that, I still prefer having the higher star count than not, and being left with same old mantras like...
We filled our needsA lot of our guys would have 5 stars if they were Bama recruits.A 3-star juco has more value coming in than a 4-star true FR, so our class is really better than our rankingetc...
I think we would all agree that TCU has been a pretty darn good team over the last 5 seasons. (Baylor too!) We can no longer say that they aren't as good as their AP poll rank because they play in the Big 12. I don't think MZ has had a recruiting class ranked in the top 20 over this same period, and they have proven us all wrong about that. So how is it that these tiny schools, by comparison to SEC schools, can build such quality teams with almost all 3-star players? Is it really coaching by coaches who know how to develop players...or what?