At this ESPN ranking of every Power 4 team's offseason. I scrolled through it and I am sure they graded us on our portal haul and our recruiting class and all that nonsense. And I get it, that is the world we live in now. But you know what that ranking does not measure? It does not measure whether a kid is going to stick around when things get hard. It does not measure whether a kid from Florida is going to look at a January morning in Madison and decide he wants to go somewhere else. And that is the whole problem with this sport now. It is not about building a program anymore. It is about assemmbling a roster like you are putting together a fantasy team.
I remember when Coach Alvarez took over in 1990 and we were awful. I mean absolutely terrible. We went 1-10 that first year. But you know what did not happen? Nobody transferred. Nobody looked for a better NIL deal. Those kids stayed and they worked and they built something that lasted for a decade. By 1993 we were in the Rose Bowl. By 1994 we were Big Ten champions. That does not happen in this era. You cannot build that kind of culture when every spring you are wondering which of your starters is going to enter the portal.
And now they eliminated the spring transfer window starting in 2026. So all the movement happens in the winter. Great. That just means kids are making decisions about where to play based on what happened in a season that ended two months earlier. Nobody is watching spring practice film and saying "you know what, this kid really developed in the offseason." No. They are looking at the stat sheet and the NIL offers and that is it.
The worst part is watching programs like Colorado bring in 43 transfers and Oklahoma State bring in 50. Fifty players. That is not a football team. That is a collection of mercenaries. And I know people will say we need to adapt or get left behind. But I look at what we built in the 90s and early 2000s and I wonder if any of that is even possible anymore. You look at the 1998 team that went to the Rose Bowl and beat UCLA. Every single one of those kids was recruited out of high school. Every single one of them developed in our system. They knew what it meant to put on that W on the side of the helmet.
I am not saying we should not use the portal at all. But I am tired of grading offseasons based on how many players you bought in December. I want to know who is going to be here in November when the weather turns and the game means something. That is what matters. And you cannot measure that in any ranking.