ESPN puts out their portal class rankings and we are sitting there in the top 25 again and I just cannot get past how this has become the way you build a program. Back in the 1980s when Coach Dooley was running things you went out and recruited a kid from Valdosta or Thomasville or some little town you could barely find on a map and you watched him grow up in your program. You saw him as a freshman who could not find his way to the practice field and by his junior year he was starting in the Jacksonville game against Florida and you knew every step of that jorney because you lived it with him.
Nowadays we are just shopping for players like we are at the grocery store. Need a linebacker? Go to the portal. Need a cornerback? Portal. Need a kicker? Portal. There is no loyalty anymore. These kids commit to a school and then six months later they are in the portal because they are not getting enough playing time or the NIL deal is better somewhere else. I watched three guys leave our program this offseason that we had invested two years of development into and they just walked out the door like it was nothing. Coach Dooley would have never put up with that nonsense. You committed to Georgia and that meant something. You wore that G on your helmet with pride and you did not just pack your bags because the weather was better somewhere else.
The worst part is that the portal killed the walk-on tradition. Remember when we had kids who showed up to practice every single day knowing they would never see the field on Saturday but they did it because they loved the University of Georgia? Those kids are gone now because every scholarship spot is being used on portal transfers. We used to build depth through development and now we build it through the waiver wire. I am tired of it. I will never get used to this new way of doing things. Give me the old days when you recruited a kid as a freshman and watched him graduate as a Bulldog. That is real football.