I will die on this hill: the walk on program at Alabama used to be the backbone of this program and now it is just an afterthought because everybody wants a scholarship handed to them on day one. You look at what we had in the 1990s under Coach Stallings and you had kids paying their own way for two years just for the chance to strap it on in practice and maybe earn a jersey on Saturdays. That is how you build a program. That is how you develop culture. That is how you get guys who will run through a wall for the guy next to them because they earned every single snap they ever took.
We had walk ons that became special teams legends. We had guys who never played a down in a real game but they were the ones who made the starters better in practice every Tuesday and Wednesday in October. Coach Stallings used to say that the walk on room was where the heart of the team lived and I believed him because I saw it with my own eyes. Those kids would come in at six in the morning and stay until the lights went out and they never complained once because they loved this university and they loved this team.
Now everything is transactional. You got kids bouncing from school to school through the portal and the only question they ask is what is my NIL package going to look like. Nobody wants to grind. Nobody wants to earn it. They want the jersey handed to them before they have even stepped foot in a college weight room. You see what Colorado is doing with 43 transfers and what Oklahoma State is doing with 50 and it is just a different world. It is a rental system not a program.
I think about the 1992 national championship team and how many walk ons contributed to that season in ways that never showed up on a stat sheet. The scout team kids who ran the Miami offense all week in practice so our defense could prepare for the option. The guys who worked the tackling dummies and the sleds and never missed a single workout in the offseason. That is what built Alabama football. That is what made us different from everybody else.
Now we are using the portal to revamp the offensive line and I get it because you have to adapt or you get left behind. But I would trade every single transfer we brought in this offseason for one kid who walked on in 1993 and stayed for four years and never once thought about leaving. That kid bled crimson. That kid would have died for this program. You cannot buy that kind of loyalty with all the NIL money in the world and that is what makes me sad about where this sport is headed.