Three years ago when we landed that quarterback from Louisiana, the one who was supposed to be the next great TCU signal caller, I told my son this is how you build a program. You find a kid who grew up wanting to wear the horned frog on his helmet, you get him on campus early, you let him learn the system for a year or two, and then he leads you for three seasons. That was the TCU way. That was how we did it back in the 1998 Sun Bowl season when we had a quarterback who actually stayed all four years and took us to places this program had not seen since the Southwest Conference days.
Now I open up ESPN and read their Big 12 preview and they have Texas Tech as the team to beat because of Brendan Sorsby and some eligibility ruling that I still do not fully understand. And you know what, they are probably right. Because Texas Tech went out and got a proven quarterback through the portal and the courts and the NIL collective and all of that nonsense. Meanwhile we are sitting here in June trying to figure out who is going to take the snaps under center in August and I cannot even tell you if that Louisiana kid is still on the roster or if he jumped to some SEC school for a bigger bag.
This is what recruiting has become. You do not build relationships anymore. You do not spend Friday nights in some Texas high school gym watching a junior throw the ball around and talking to his parents about what it means to be a Horned Frog. You sit in your office and you open up the portal database and you start making phone calls to kids who have already quit on one program and you hope they do not quit on yours. The 2005 season when we went 11-1, that team had guys who had been in the system for three and four years. They knew each other. They knew the ccoaches. They knew what it meant to put on that jersey.
And now we are supposed to get excited about a summer dead period where we might land a transfer from some school who could be gone the second another program offers a better NIL deal. I am tired of it. I am tired of not knowing who is going to be on the field in September. I am tired of the SEC and the Big Ten hoarding all the high school talent while the rest of us fight over scraps in the portal. This is not the sport I fell in love with watching in the 1980s. This is professional free agency with a college uniform.