You see Bill Connelly put out his conference previews and I just have to laugh at how this sport has changed. Back in the 2002 season when we won the SEC with that defense that held Tennessee to 13 points in the SEC Championship, you knew exactly what you were getting from every team in the league. Now we have Texas and Oklahoma in our conference, the Big Ten is a coast to coast mess, and nobody can keep a rooster together for more than one season. I miss the days when you could name the starting lineup in April and they would still be there in November.
Three portal losses in one week and our depth chart looks different than it did at the end of spring practice. That never happened when Coach Dooley was running things. You had walk ons who would bleed red and black for four years just to get a chance to play on special teams. Now these kids see a bigger NIL bag somewhere else and they are gone before the leaves change color. The 1980 team that won it all with Herschel had the same 22 starters every single week. You cannot build a program when your roster turns over 30 percent every winter.
I watched our spring game and I saw some good things from the new guys we brought in through the portal. But I also saw a lot of confusion on the offensive line and that worries me. We lost some real dogs up front to the NFL draft and I am not convinced the replacements are ready for SEC football in September. The 2005 team had that offensive line that opened holes for Thomas Brown and Danny Ware and those boys played together for three years. Chemistry matters. You cannot buy that with NIL money.
The recruiting rankings have us sitting at No. 11 in the 2027 class with zero five stars and people are panicking. I remember the 2002 team that had five guys drafted and only one of them was a five star recruit. That team had Max Jean Gilles and David Pollack and Boss Bailey and none of them were handed anything. They earned it in the weight room and on the practice field. These recruiting services are a joke anyway. They had us ranked 15th in 2017 and that class won a natty.
I will say this about the new staff. They are working hard in fall camp and I like the way they are rotating guys through the two deep. We have a Wednesday night game against Tennessee State to open the season and I remember when we used to open against Georgia Southern or Arkansas State and you could empty the bench by the third quarter. Now every game is a dogfight because of the portal and NIL and everybody has talent. But I still believe we have the best program in the country when it comes to developing players the right way. We just need to keep our guys home and build through the high school ranks like we always did.