ESPN can rank our offseason however they want, call it a B-minus or whatever, but I sat in the cold at Sanford Stadium in the 1996 season watching Coach Goff try to piece together a roster after guys like Hines Ward left early. Back then you lost a player to graduation or maybe an early draft entry, not to another school offering a better NIL deal in May. Now I look at our spring practice reports and I see the same thing happening all over college football. Oklahoma State brings in 50 portal guys. Colorado brings in 43. It is a free agency league and loyalty is dead.
We landed the 5-star tight end Kaiden Prothro and that is great, I am glad we are playing the game. But tell me how many of these kids will still be on our roster in two years when some school from the Big Ten throws a bag at them after we spent years developing them? I remember when we built the 1997 SEC Championship team with guys who came in as freshmen, sat the bench for two years, and then became leaders. That is lost. You cannot build a program on one-year rentals and portal mercenaries. Coach Dooley used to say you build a team in the weight room in February, not in the transfer portal in April.