Just saw the CBS Sports post-spring power rankings with BYU on top of the Big 12 and I had to put the phone down for a minute. This league we fought through the 1990s to build, through the WAC and Conference USA and the Mountain West, through every snub and every time the national media laughed at us for thinking we belonged with the big boys. And now here we are with a league where the pecking order changes every six months based on who hit the portal hardest in the winter window. BYU deserves respect for what they are doing, do not get me wrong. But this is not the same conference we joined back in 2012 when we walked into that first season thinking we had finally aarrived. The rivalries we built with Texas and Oklahoma are gone. The annual battles with Baylor that meant something because both programs had climbed out of the same hole together. The trips to Lubbock and Stillwater and Waco that had history behind them. Now I look at the schedule and I see Utah and BYU and UCF and Houston and I have to remind myself which schools are even in our league anymore. The 2010 Rose Bowl season feels like it happened in a different universe. That team had guys who had been together since 2007. They knew each other. They knew the program. They knew what it meant to put on that purple jersey because they had been doing it for years. Now you get a guy in the portal for one season, he puts up numbers, and he is gone to the NFL or chasing another bag somewhere else. The CBS Sports piece talks about the Big 12 being the most upwardly mobile league in major football and I guess that is supposed to be a compliment. But upwardly mobile just means nobody stays put. Nobody builds anything. Nobody plants a flag and says this is who we are. The 1999 Sun Bowl team would not recognize this sport. Coach Fran would look at the portal and walk right back out the door. I will watch every snap this fall like I always have. But the feeling is different now. It is like watching a house you grew up in get sold to strangers who paint the walls different colors and tear down the porch swing. The structure is still there but it is not home anymore.