Just saw that ESPN list of the best player by jersey number and it got me thinking about something that's been bothering me all spring. We got Osani Gayles to commit, which is fine, good for the kid, but I watch Oregon stacking five-stars like they're collecting baseball cards and I cannot help but think about how we used to do it under Coach Bryant and then under Coach Stallings in the 90s. You remember how we built the 1992 championship team? We went into Mississippi and Georgia and pulled kids out of towns nobody had ever heard of. We found a fullback from a place with one stoplight and turned him into a All-SEC blocker. We did not need five-star ratings because Coach Stallings knew what he was looking at when he watched film. He could tell you by the second quarter of a high school game whether a kid had the grit to play at Alabama. Now we are celebrating a four-star receiver like we just won the national title and meanwhile the Ducks have five five-stars in one class and half of them are from the West Coast where they never had to play in a September humid evening in the Swamp or a November night in Death Valley. I am not saying Gayles cannot play. I am saying that when I was growing up, Alabama did not celebrate getting a four-star. We expected five-stars to come to us because that is what Alabama was. Coach Stallings would have walked into any living room in the country and the mama would have already had the sweet tea ready. Now we are fighting for scraps while Oregon and Ohio State and Georgia load up and I just do not know what this program is becoming. The transfer portal killed the loyalty and NIL killed the mystique and now we are sitting here in July hoping a four-star receiver from somewhere is going to save our recruiting class. Coach Bryant would have pulled a running back out of a Birmingham public school who nobody wanted and won three national titles with him. That is what made us different. That is what made us Alabama.