Spent the afternoon scrolling through that ESPN best player by jersey number list and I had to put the phone down after a while. You know what bothered me the most? Not just that they probably shortchanged us on a handful of numbers but the whole exercise itself. Back in the early 90s when we were stacking those SEC championships under Coach Stallings we did not have time to sit around ranking every jersey number from 0 to 99. We knew who the greats were because we watched them on Saturday afternoons in the heat. You did not need a months long project from Bristol to tell you Derrick Thomas was the best number 55 to ever strap it on. You knew it because you saw him wrecking quarterbacks against that 1988 LSU team in Baton Rouge when everything was on the line. That is the difference between then and now. Everything has to be packaged and ranked and debated like some kind of fantasy draft. The players we had from the 79 Sugar Bowl team through the 92 national championship squad did not play for the ESPN 300 or the five star ratings. They played because they wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves. They wanted to run through that tunnel at Bryant-Denny and hear 100,000 people screaming for the crimson and white. You cannot rank that on a spreadsheet and you cannot capture it with a jersey number list. That is what these kids today are missing. They care more about where they fit on some national ranking than what it means to put on that jersey and represent three decades of tradition.