If we compare the last few years of his tenure with the last few years of previous coaches of other UND sports, you see he has a couple things going for him.
Most importantly, he doesn't have a name or nickname that starts with B. Secondly, he continues to recruit solid players.
Between Brewster, Bubba, Berry, Bernhard you can see their quality of recruits the final couple of years really started to drop. They seemed to get complacent and let social media and the facilities do the recruiting for them.
Sather is still getting decent talent even if it's leaving after one or two years.