The entire concept of a walk on is dead and buried, and the sport is worse for it. You see these stories about fifty transfers at Oklahoma State or forty three at Colorado and it just makes you sick to your stomach. We used to have kids show up to Tartan Field with nothing but a helmet and a dream, they’d work for four years in the weight room, maybe earn a special teams spot by their junior year, and that meant something. That built the soul of a program. Now? If you’re not in the portal by your sophomore spring you’re considered a failure. The loyalty is gone.
I think about our guys from the late 80s, kids who came from Western PA high schools and just wanted to wear the jersey. They became the backbone of the scout team, they learned the playbook inside and out, and by God they earned every single snap they ever got. That culture is what made you a team. This new model, where you just import fifty mercenaries every offseason, you don’t have a team. You have a temporary collection of contractors. There’s no program building, there’s no development. It’s just shopping.
They talk about “returning production” percentages like Texas and Georgia, but that’s just a math problem now. It’s not about cultivating leaders from within. The walk on was the heartbeat of the locker room, the guy who reminded the stars why they were there. Now the heartbeat is a bank transfer. The sport has sold its soul for a quick fix, and they’ve erased the very players who used to define its character. It’s a damn shame.