Wait so I'm supposed to get excited about us sitting at No. 24 in the 2027 recruiting rankings while Ohio State and Georgia are loading up on five-stars like they're collecting baseball cards? And the media wants me to believe this is all fine because NIL is "leveling the playing field" and spreading talent around? Leveling the playing field my backside. All it did was turn recruiting into a bidding war where the richest programs just buy whoever they want.
I remember when we landed kids because Barry Alvarez sat in their living room and told them the truht. You come to Wisconsin, you work harder than anybody else, you run the ball down people's throats, and you win. That was the pitch. No fancy NIL collectives, no BBQ visits with bagmen, no promise of a seven-figure check before you ever take a snap. You earned your scholarship by showing up every day and proving you belonged. Chris Chambers came here because he wanted to be a Badger, not because somebody flashed a checkbook. That 1998 team that went to the Rose Bowl? We didn't have a single five-star recruit on the roster. We had a bunch of kids from Wisconsin and the Midwest who were told they weren't good enough and decided to prove everybody wrong.
Now look at what we've become. Hosting recruits for barbecues and calling it a win. Watching kids commit to Oregon or Texas or Georgia because their NIL deal is bigger. The portal makes it worse. You spend three years developing a kid and he bails the second somebody offers him more money. There's no loyalty left. None. I watched the 1993 Badgers beat Notre Dame at Camp Randall because those kids bled red and white. They would have run through a wall for each other. You think any of these portal mercenaries care about the program? They care about their bag.
I don't care if we're No. 24 in recruiting. I care about building a team that actually wants to be here. But that's not how the game works anymore. The game works with NIL and the portal and kids jumping ship every December. It's a mess and I hate it.