Just saw that ESPN Big Ten preview and I had to sit down for a minute. Oregon and Ohio State at the top, USC getting all the hype, and we are buried in the middle of the pack again. You know what really gets me about this whole thing? It is not that we cannot compete. We have the program. We have Camp Randall. We have the history. It is that the entire sport has been turned into a corporate auction house and nobody even pretends it is about loyalty anymore.
I remember when the Big Ten meant something. When we played Minnesota for Paul Bunyan's Axe and it actually mattered because both teams had kids from the Midwest who grew up hating each other. Now we have Oregon flying across two time zones to play a Thursday night game in Madison and half the roster is from California anyway. The conference realignment destroyyed everything. We lost the old rivalries, we lost the regional identity, and we lost the sense that these games meant something bigger than a television contract.
Barry Alvarez built this program on Wisconsin kids, on walk-ons, on three yards and a cloud of dust. He took a program that was a laughingstock in the late 80s and turned it into a Rose Bowl champion. And now? Now we are supposed to get excited about some transfer from a school I have never heard of because he had a good spring practice. The portal has turned college football into free agency and I hate it.
You watch Oregon stack five-star recruits and you watch Ohio State reload every single year and you wonder where that leaves programs like ours. We are not going to outspend the big dogs. We are not going to win the NIL arms race. But we used to win by being tougher, by being smarter, by developing kids for four years and watching them become men. That does not exist anymore.
The ESPN preview probably has us at 7-5 again and you know what? That might be generous in this new landscape. We are playing Notre Dame this fall and that used to be a marquee matchup. Now it is just another game on the schedule against a team that is also trying to figure out what the hell college football even is anymore. I do not recognize the sport I grew up loving.