Fall camp starting and I see ESPN has us ranked 24th in the 2027 class, right behind Minnesota. That used to mean something when Barry Alvarez was pulling kids from small towns nobody ever heard of and turning them into All-Big Ten linemen. Now it is all about who has the biggest NIL bag and which five-star is willing to take a discount to play for a program that actually develops talent.
I remember when we did not need to worry about recruiting rankings because we knew what we were building. The 1993 Rose Bowl team had exactly zero five-star recruits on the entire roster. Zero. And we ran the ball down the throats of UCLA in Pasadena because we had a system and we stuck to it. These kids today would transfer the second they lost a spring battle.
We sit here in 2026 with a new athletic director coming back from Nebraska and I just do not know what identity we are trying to sell anymore. You cannot recruit like Ohio State and you cannot portal your way to relevance overnight. The o...