Gets me about this ESPN piece scouting 21 five-star kids who have never played a snap of college football? It is the same song and dance every spring. They rank them, they rate them, they tell us how they "fit" at the next level. But I remembr when we built our 1992 national championship team around a bunch of overlooked farm boys from Alabama and Georgia who had something to prove. We did not need 21 five-stars. We needed a quarterback who could hand the ball off to Derrick Lassic and a defense that would knock your teeth in. That team went 13-0 and nobody was putting crystal balls on the mantel in April.
Nowadays every program is chasing these five-star kids and throwing bags of NIL money at them before they have even taken a high school snap. I look at what Oregon is doing with five five-stars in their 2026 class and I just shake my head. Good for them I guess. But I remember when we beat Oregon in the 2014 Sugar Bowl and they had all those fancy recruiting rankings too. Marcus Mariota was the Heisman winner and we stuffed them 35-17 because we had a defense that Coach Saban built on fundamentals and discipline, not on recruiting stars.
The portal situation is just making it worse. Kids commit and decommit three times before signing day. You cannot build a program that way. Coach Bryant would have looked at these kids flipping their commitments over a video call and told them to get off his lawn. We used to have signing day in February and you waited for the fax machine to ring. That was it. No drama. No hat ceremonies.
I am not saying the new kids cannot play. Some of them are talented. But we are putting too much stock in these rankings before they earn anything. Let them take a hit in the SEC first. Then we can talk about how they fit. Until then I will take a hungry three-star from Mobile who grew up wanting to wear the crimson over a five-star who is already counting his NIL check.