ESPN drops their offseason rankings and grades our portal haul and I just think back to how we used to build a football team. Remember when coach Goff or coach Dooley would send assistants into south Georgia towns like Moultrie or Valdosta and they would sit on a front porch with a kid and his daddy and talk about what it meant to wear the G beween the hedges? That was recruiting. That was building a program. You did not need a portal ranking or a transfer grade. You needed a relationship and a handshake and a promise that if the kid worked hard he would get a fair shot.
Now we got kids bouncing around like they are playing musical chairs with NIL money. I see Oregon bringing in five five-star recruits and Dylan Raiola from the portal and I wonder how many of those kids know the history of the program they are playing for. I see Colorado with 43 transfers and I think about the 1992 team that won the SEC East with guys who had been in the system for three and four years. They knew the snap count without thinking. They knew what the linebacker was going to do because they had seen him in practice for three years.
You cannot buy chemistry in the portal. You cannot grade that on a spreadsheet. Kirby Smart is out here fighting the right fight trying to keep our culture intact while the whole sport burns down around us. I watched him on ESPN talking about the Big Ten having an edge and I know what he really means. He means the edge comes from development and stability and kids who stay in the weight room for four years instead of jumping ship the first time they get passed on the depth chart.
We got Kaiden Prothro coming in as a five-star tight end and that is great. But I want to know who is going to coach him up. I want to know who is going to teach him to block the safety on a counter play like the tight ends we had in the 2002 SEC Championship team. That is what matters. Not the portal grade. Not the star rating. The coaching. The development. The culture.
Give me a kid from Buford or Camden County who grew up dreaming of running through the hedges over a transfer who is looking for the highest bidder every single time. That is how we won in 1980 and that is how we won in 2021. The portal is just a shortcut and shortcuts do not build championships.