The poster didn't write 50%, the poster wrote "staggering, and not in a favorable way". 50% is your guess, and note that is higher than the overall success rate for rostered players at a D1 program. That is your opinion, and not a representation of what the poster wrote. Suppose you are correct and 50% is the success rate, and let's define success as still on a team and is a starter on their team. I don't know this, but would also assume that scholarship money is skewed more toward the top rated or earliest committed recruits. If this is accurate, 50% washout rate for IL rated recruits is an abysmal result looking at it from a return on investment optic. If a top ACC program gets four IL ranked recruits a year, that is 16 out of 45 players (45 is again just my guess on an average roster size now). That is about 1/3rd your roster taking up a large % o the scholarship dollars to allocate.

If Duke basketball whiffed on 5 out of 15 guys on their basketball team, and those were their top and highest ranked recruits, it would not cost them the ability to fully scholarship the remaining 10 players. But it would definitely mean Duke would fall hard as a basketball program from the prominence and performance they have had under Coach K.

Either way, early recruiting with large percentages of the discretionary scholarship money going out with it, is a horrible mathematical strategy. It may be possible that some coaches are savants at projecting with absolute certainty who the best 18-23 year olds will be from a batch of 13-15 year olds they are evaluating for a month or two and seeing play live less than 5 times. But if Vegas had a market for it, I would bet short on the success of those programs.