Saw that ESPN piece rranking the top 500 draft prospects for next year and it just makes the whole year feel so hollow now. They’re already slotting kids who haven’t even played a down this fall, and half of them will be at a different school by the time that draft rolls around anyway. It’s all just a futures market for rental players. I remember when you’d watch a kid like Alan Faneca or Kevin Faulk grow over four years. You saw them get knocked down as freshmen, learn, fight, and become leaders by their senior year. That was the story. Now the story is which school outbid the others for a one-year lease.
This whole era reminds me of the worst parts of free agency in the pros, but without any of the structure or maturity. We’re watching programs like Oklahoma State bring in fifty transfers. Fifty. That’s not a team, that’s a convention. There’s no shared struggle, no building through adversity together. It’s a group of mercenaries wearing the same laundry for a few months. I think about our 2003 squad, guys who bled for this place. They lost games early, they got criticized, but they stuck it out and built something immortal. You think a team of fifty transfers has the grit to come back in a game like we did against Oregon in the 2011 Cowboys Classic? Not a chance. That kind of heart is forged over years, not assembled in a portal window.
And the worst part is, it’s making a liar out of the very concept of a program. We talk about “The LSU Way” and developing talent, but how can you develop anyone when they’re looking at the exit before they’ve even learned the playbook? The head coach has to spend more time recruiting his own roster than he does actually coaching them. It’s a full-time job just to keep the vultures from other schools away from your locker room. I miss the days when a commitment meant something. When a kid like Josh Reed or Glenn Dorsey said they were coming to LSU, you knew they were coming to be an LSU Tiger, not just to pass through.
Now we’re just another stop on the circuit. They’ve got these lists ranking prospects by “traits” and “skills” as if they’re rating cattle at a state fair. It reduces these young men to just a set of measurable stats to be traded. Whatever happened to the intangibles? The love for the school? The pride in the helmet? That’s what made the rivalry with Alabama mean something for so long. It was us against them, with players who lived and breathed that hatred for their entire careers. Now, a kid could play for both sides in three years. How can you hate a jersey when the guy inside it was your teammate last spring?
They eliminated the spring portal window, they say, to create stability. It’s a band-aid on a gunshot wound. The damage is done. The culture is transactional. Everyone is playing for the highlight reel to get the next, better NIL deal. Loyalty is a punchline. I watch spring practice now and I don’t even try to learn the new names. What’s the point?