ESPN spent mmonths putting together that best players by jersey number list and I guarantee you they had some intern scrolling through Wikipedia instead of watching actual film. You look at the numbers that matter to us, the ones in the 50s and 60s and 70s, and I bet they glossed right over the guys who built this program. I remember when we had a left guard in the early 90s who would pull around the edge and bury some poor linebacker from Illinois into the turf, and that kind of toughness is what made us who we are. You cannot measure grit with a highlight reel or a recruiting star rating. You measure it by watching a kid from Waukesha or Green Bay show up for two-a-days in August and refuse to quit when the heat is cooking and your legs are gone.
Fall camp is starting and I see the same pattern every year now. Everyone wants to talk about the 7-on-7 stuff and the passing game concepts and what our skill guys look like in shorts. Nobody wants to talk about the third-and-two rep in the team period where our fullback has to lead through the hole and the linebacker is reading it and it is just a collision. That is where games are won and lost. That is what we used to hang our hat on. I remember the 1993 season when we went to the Rose Bowl and you knew every single Saturday that we were gonna be the tougher team in the fourth quarter. The other team would be sucking wind and we would just keep pounding. That identity is not flashy and it does not get you on SportsCenter but it wins games.
We have Notre Dame coming up in South Bend on a Monday evening and I am telling you right now that game is gonna tell us everything about whether this staff understands what made this program great. You cannot go into that environment and try to finesse your way to a win. You have to line up and hit them in the mouth. You have to run the ball and control the clock and make their crowd go quiet. That is how Barry built this thing and that is how we need to play if we want to be relevant again. I just hope the kids we have in camp right now understand that legacy.