Just saw the news about Oklahoma State bringing in 50 portal transfers. Fifty. That’s not a football team, that’s a convention. It reminds me of the 2011 squad, a group that grew together and fought for each other. You can’t build that with a receipt.
This is what realignment has done. It’s not just about maps and TV deals anymore. It’s created this frantic, desperate atmosphere where a program feels it has to completely gut itself and start over every few years just to keep up in a league that doesn’t even resemble the one we signed up for. We used to know our opponents, their tendencies, their best players. Now we’re playing a schedule full of strangers while trying to field a team of them.
The heart of a program used to be its continuity. The guys who stayed through the lean years and became legends. What are we building for now? A one-year rental to maybe get to a bowl game nobody remembers? The Big 12 I fell in love with died when Oklahoma and Texas left. Now we’re all just scrambling in the rubble, and this 50-man swap meet is the perfect, depressing symbol of it.