Wait so Iowa State's AD Jamie Pollard is fed up with the Big Ten and SEC spending and tells them to go break away? I've been saying this for years now. The gap between the haves and have-nots is worse than anything I saw in the old Southwest Conference days. Back when we were fighting for respect in the WAC and C-USA under Coach Fran, you could still win with a bunch of three-star kids who wanted to prove something.
Now you got programs just buying rosters every December window because they closed the spring portal. That's what really gets me. They shut the sping window to stop the chaos but all it did was make the winter window a feeding frenzy. You miss fixing a hole in December and you're stuck with it all season. That's not football, that's shopping.
And Pollard is right. If the Big Ten and SEC want to be their own little club with their own rules and their own spending limits, let them go. We used to have real rivalries in this conference. I remember when we'd play Iowa State and you could feel how much that game meant to both programs. Now it's just about who has the biggest NIL collective.
The old way was better. You recruited high school kids, you developed them for three or four years, and you went to battle with your brothers. Now it's a rental system. Makes me sick what this sport has become.