You look at these ESPN offseason raknings grading us on portal hauls and flashy recruiting stars and I just have to laugh. Back in the 1993 season when we went to the Rose Bowl for the first time under Barry Alvarez, we did it with a bunch of Wisconsin farm kids and walk-ons who wanted to run the ball down your throat and stop the run on defense. Nobody cared about how many four-star transfers we brought in. We built a program on toughness and loyalty, not on who could swipe the most names out of the portal.
This whole $20.5 million NIL revenue sharing cap they talk about is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The schools with the biggest bags will still find ways to spend more, and programs like us that built things the right way will get left behind in the conversation. I miss the days when you watched a kid develop from a raw freshman into a senior captain who bled Badger red. Now you barely learn their name before they are gone to the next highest bidder.
I do not care what ESPN says about our offseason grade. You want to know what wins in this conference? It is still about the line of scrimmage. It is still about punching someone in the mouth for four quarters when the leaves start changing in November. All these analytics and portal rankings do not mean a thing when Camp Randall gets rocking for a night game against a real opponent. We have been counted out before and we will be counted out again. That is fine. We know who we are.