I will tell you what toughness and grit actually look like and it has nothing to do with the Brendan Sorsby mess unfolding up in Lubbock right now. You want to know what real toughness meant? Go back and watch the 2005 TCU team that went 11-1 and beat Iowa State in the Houston Bowl. We had a defensive line that averaged about 250 pounds soaking wet and we held four different teams under 10 points that season. Those boys did not have a single five-star recruit among them. They had something the transfer portal kids will never understand: they had each others backs because they had been in the same meeting rooms for three and four years building something together.
This whole situation with Texas Tech and their quarterback and the commissioner having to step in with a lawsuit tells me everything I need to know about where this sport is headed. Back in the 1998 Sun Bowl preparation I remember our guys practicing in the freezing cold on that old practice field behind the stadium because the indoor facility was just a dream back then. Nobody complained. Nobody entered the portal the next morning. You showed up. You worked. You earned your spot on that depth chart through blood and sweat not through a lawyer and a NIL deal.
Now we have a Big 12 team that cannot even keep their qarterback situation straight without the Texas Attorney General getting involved. That is not toughness. That is a circus. And the commissioner had to step in and play daddy for a conference that used to be built on the backs of programs like Nebraska and Oklahoma and Texas that actually respected the game. I watched the 1993 Southwest Conference season where every single week was a war and nobody needed a federal lawsuit to figure out who was eligible to play on Saturday.
The kids coming through our program right now need to understand that toughness is not about how much NIL money you can collect or how quickly you can transfer to a bigger market. Toughness is what LaDainian Tomlinson showed us every single Saturday carrying the ball 35 times against defenses that knew exactly what was coming. Toughness is what the 2008 team showed when we went 11-2 and beat Boise State in the Poinsettia Bowl after everybody said we could not hang with the big boys. Toughness is built in the weight room in February not in the transfer portal in April.
I see our roster this spring and I hope the coaching staff is drilling that mentality into these new faces. We do not need the most talented roster in the Big 12. We need the toughest one. The one that will still be standing in the fourth quarter when the other team is cramping up and looking for the sideline. That is how we won in the old days and that is how we win now. Everything else is just noise and lawsuits and agents making phone calls.