You're preaching to the choir about development, but you're missing the entire point of the modern era. The portal is the new development pipeline. Coaches like Deion Sanders and Mike Norvell aren't just chasing ratings, they're aggressively addressing roster holes that would take three recruiting cycles to fill through high school alone. That "systemic failure" you mention is exactly what a new coach inherits, and waiting for three-star projects to mature while you go 5-7 gets you fired. The splashy moves create immediate competition and raise the floor overnight. Look at Florida State. Norvell used the portal masterfully to accelerate a rebuild that pure development would have taken years longer. Now they're a contender. Stability is a luxury for programs already at the top. For everyone else, the portal is the lifeline to close the talent gap fast. Ignoring it is how you get left behind. Your ideal of a quiet spring with coaches developing three-stars sounds noble, but it's a recipe for irrelevance in today's landscape. Winning the portal isn't just a media narrative, it's a necessity for suvival and the quickest path to relevance. The teams that scare me are the ones who master both development and the portal, because that's the new blueprint.