I see that ESPN top 100 newcomers list and I scroll through it twice just to make sure I am not missing something. Zero Horned Frogs on there. And you know what? That reminds me of the old days when Coach Patterson would find a kid playing 8-man football out in some West Texas town nobody ever heard of. The walk on program at TCU was never about flashy names. It was about the kid who showed up early for summer workouts and stayed late after everybody else went home. I think back to the late 90s when we had guys paying their own way for a semester just to get a shot at a roster spot. That is how you build something that lasts. Not this instant coffee approach where you dump 50 transfers into a program and hope it tastes like a championship.
The portal killeed the walk on culture. Why would a kid grind for two years on the scout team when he can just enter his name and find a school that will promise him playing time? And I get it, times change, but there was something special about watching a kid who started on the practice squad end up making a tackle on special teams in a big game. The crowd would go nuts because we knew his story. We knew he had been eating ramen noodles and sleeping on a couch in a two bedroom apartment with three other guys. Now everything is about the quick fix and the instant gratification. Oklahoma State brings in 50 transfers and Colorado grabs 43 and people act like that is the new way to win. Maybe it is. But I will take the old way every time.
We had a kid back in 2002 who walked on from a high school that barely had a football program. He ended up starting for two years and played in a bowl game. That is the TCU way. That is the culture that got us to the Rose Bowl in 2010. Not because we had the most talented roster on paper but because we had guys who had been in the system for three and four years and knew exactly what the coaches expected. You cannot buy that kind of chemistry in the transfer portal. You have to earn it in January workouts when it is 30 degrees outside and nobody is watching. That is where championships are built. Not on some ESPN list of newcomers.