Fall camp is here and I keep hearing about how we are gonna be "tougher" now that Eichorst is coming back as AD. And I just laugh. I remember when toughness was not something you needed to talk about. You just watched the 1993 Rose Bowl team punch teams in the mouth for four quarters and that was that. Now we have to hire a guy who got fired from Nebraska to remind us how to build a program.
The whole sport has gone soft. You see Oklahoma State bringing in 50 transfers and Colorado with 43 and everybody acts like that is how you win. Barry Alvarez would have laughed those guys out of the building. You built a program by developing three-star kids from Wisconsin who wanted to run through a wall for the Badgers. Not by shopping for mercenaries in the portal every spring.
I look at our roster heading into this season and I do not know what we have. Fall camp used to be about settling who was gonna be the next great fullback or who was gonna step up at linebacker. Now it is about who is gonna stick around after the first contact drill. The portal killed the whole idea of earning your stripes. Kids leave the second they have to compete for a job.
We are flying out to South Bend later this year to play Notre Dame on a Friday night and I cannoot get behind that either. I remember when we played those games at noon on a Saturday in November. Real football weather. Real football tradition. Now everything is about TV windows and NIL deals. The toughness I grew up watching is just a memory.