The recruiting rankings say Oregon has five five-star kids and Georgia is sitting at number one again and I just have to laugh. I remember when LaDainian Tomlinson was a two-star recruit that nobody wanted. He came to us out of a Texas high school that barely had a weight room. The old staff saw him at a summer camp and offered him on the spot based on how he ran between the tackles in a seven-on-seven drill. There was no 247Sports composite ranking. There was no crystal ball. There was a coach with a stopwatch and a gut feeling. That is how you built the 1998 Sun Bowl team and the 2000 team that nearly beat Oregon State in the Mobile Alabama Bowl. We found kids who played both ways at 2A schools and developed them over four years.
You watch these 2026 classes being assembled with five-star prospects committing to programs they visited once for a weekend and I wonder how many of them will ever play meaningful snaps. We used to recruit the state of Texas and the state of Texas only. Coach Franchione had a rule that if a kid was not from a 200-mile radius of Fort Worth you better have a damn good reason to offer him. That is how we got guys who understood what it meant to put on the purple jersey. They grew up watching us play in the old Southwest Conference. They knew about the Battle for the Iron Skillet and the rivalry with Baylor that nobody outside of Texas even remembers anymore. Now you have kids from California and Florida signing with us because their NIL deal is 50 grand higher than the next offer.
The transfer portal killed the idea of building a program through high school recruiting. You used to bring in a class of 25 freshmen and know that maybe 12 of them would be starters by their junior season. You watched them grow up in the weight room. You watched them learn the offense over three spring practices. You watched them take their lumps as sophomores and then become all-conference players as seniors. Now you bring in 15 transfers in one winter and hope they can learn the playbook by August. That is not building a program. That is renting a roster. I do not care how many five-stars Oregon or Georgia sign in the 2026 year. I care about whether those kids are still on the roster in 2028.
The 1994 team that nearly beat Texas A&M in the old Southwest Conference was full of kids who committed to us because we were the only school that offered them. They had chips on their shoulders. They played angry. You do not get that from a kid who chose between four SEC schools and picked the one with the best NIL pckage. You get that from a kid who was told he was too small or too slow and decided to prove everybody wrong. That is the TCU way. That is the way we built the program that eventually got us into the Big 12 in the first place. I hope the current staff remembers that when they are chasing these five-star kids who are gonna transfer the second they do not start as true freshmen.