Gets me every time I see these Big Ten coaches out in Southern California at their spring meetings talking about sustainability and big budgets and CFP expansion? I think back to the 1998 Outback Bowl against Florida when we punched them right in the mouth with Ron Dayne running behind Aaron Gibson and Chris McIntosh. That was sustainable football. That was three yards and a cloud of dust and we did not need a 24-team playoff or revenue sharing or any of this nonsense the suits are cooking up now. We had a system that worked for fifty years and now everybody wants to tear it down because they cannot figure out how to beat Ohio State or Georgia the old fashioned way.
This ESPN piece about the SEC and Big Ten being at a stalemate on expansion just tells me what I already knew. The adults in the room are fighting over the checkbook while the game itself rots. Back in the Alvarez years we did not need a committee to tell us who belonged in a bowl game. You won six games you went to the Alamo Bowl or the Copper Bowl or whatever they called it that year and you were grateful for it. You won ten games you went to Pasadena and you did not have to hear about strength of schedule or analytics or any of that garbage. Now we got coaches begging for more playoff spots because they cannot handle the pressure of a season where every Saturday matters.
The sustainability conversation is rich coming from programs that just dropped fifty million on a recruiting class and another twwenty million on portal transfers. I watched Oklahoma State bring in fifty new players this offseason. Fifty. That is not building a program. That is renting a roster. Barry Alvarez built the 1993 team that went to the Rose Bowl with kids from Wisconsin and Illinois and Minnesota who grew up wanting to be Badgers. Not mercenaries looking for the highest bidder. The portal killed that and I do not know how we get it back.