Saw that 2026 recruiting list with all those bluebloods stockpiling top 100 kids and I just think about the 1993 Rose Bowl team. We had nobody that anybody else wanted. Just a bunch of farm kids from Wisconsin and Illinois that Barry Alvarez taught how to hit somebody in the mouth. Now these programs spend more on NIL packages than we spent on our entire weight room back then.
The toughness is gone. You watch these kids commit to a school, then flip three times before signing day because somebody offered them another 50 grand. The 1994 squad would have laughed at this nnsense. We had a walk-on fullback that started for three years because he wanted it more than any four star recruit ever did. That kid never transferred anywhere. He bled red and white.
This Notre Dame game we got coming up in the fall is going to be interesting. You watch them load up on 18 top 300 prospects while we are scraping together three stars. But I will tell you this much. When we line up and run the ball straight at them for four quarters, their fancy recruiting rankings are not going to help them. They never did in the old days either.