Three years ago I watched a kid who started for us in the Texas Bowl pack his bags and leave for a school he had never visited because they offered him thirty thousand dollars more. Thirty thousand. We had developed him since he was a raw freshman who could barely run the scout team offense. Coach Patterson used to say you build a program with four-year guys who bleed purple. Now we are running a glorified free agency system where every spring you hold your breath hoping the guy who led the team in tackles is still on the roster when summer workouts start.
This whole Brendan Sorsby mess at Texas Tech is just the symptom of a disease that has infected the entire sport. You have a quarterback who wants to go to the NFL but also wants to keep his college eligibility and the Big 12 commissioner has to step in like some kind of family court judge. I remember when the only drama around a quarterback was whether he could handle the blitz in the fourth quarter. Now we have attorneys general getting involved, lawsuits filed, and the whole conference holdding its breath because one kid cannot decide if he wants to be a professional or a student-athlete.
The spring transfer window getting eliminated is the best thing this sport has done in years but it is too little too late. These kids have learned that loyalty is optional and the only thing that matters is the highest bidder. I see what Oklahoma State is doing with fifty portal players and I just shake my head. Fifty players. That is not building a program, that is running a fantasy football league with real uniforms. Coach Patterson would have walked into the locker room and stared at a roster full of strangers and walked right back out.
You want to know what hurts the most? It is not the losing. We have lost plenty of games over the decades and we always came back stronger. What hurts is watching kids who could have been legends here treat this place like a pit stop. I think about the 2010 Rose Bowl team and how many of those guys were three-star recruits who stayed four or five years and built something together. That team had twelve seniors who had been in the program since the Conference USA days. You will never see that again. Never.
The NIL revenue-sharing model at twenty million a school is just going to codify what we already know. The rich get richer, the middle class fights over scraps, and the kids keep bouncing around like pinballs. I am tired of pretending this is about education or development or any of that nonsense. It is about money and it has been about money since somebody figured out you could pay a teenager to catch a football. The only difference now is nobody bothers to hide it anymore.