He tends to set a low bar in terms of the kind of guys he thought ND could recruit and didn't really chase the 4/5* types as much as Freeman and staff seem to do. Not a "lazy" recruiter in the vein of Ty W., but he was not really an active recruiter. He would accept less than stellar results and then essentially blame other factors for the meh classes. Keep in mind that Kelly never worked at a place(or worked for a high-level recruiting person) where recruiting was done at a high level. Central Michigan to Cincy to ND.
One of the criticisms of Kelly is that he didn't know what to do with stud players even when he had them and there is plenty of evidence of that. He had no experience with coaching high-level kids so the ones that he got he didn't know how to elevate their games to make them better than when they came to ND.