Just saw that piece about Georgia offering another four star quarterback recruit. Kaden Craft. That’s the name. It never ends. They’ve got a room full of five stars and they’re still out there collecting them like trading cards, and you know exactly why. It’s the NIL war chest. It’s not about development or fit anymore, it’s about who can write the biggest check to stockpile taent so the kid never sees the field at a place like ours. This is what killed the soul of the game. I remember when recruiting was about relationships. A coach would come into a kid’s living room in Erie or Sharon and sell the dream of building something. You’d get a two star with a chip on his shoulder who’d grow into a four year starter for the Lakers, a guy like we had in the late 90s who would run through a wall for the program because he helped lay the bricks. Now? That kid gets a token offer from us, then some SEC also-ran swoops in with a bag from a collective he’s never heard of, and he’s gone. He’ll sit on the bench for three years, enter the portal twice, and never know what it means to be part of a brotherhood. They talk about parity with NIL, that it’s spreading the talent. Don’t believe it for a second. All it’s done is create a new caste system. The Georgias and Texases of the world just use it to hoard more. The Colorados use it to buy 43 mercenaries in a single offseason. And what’s left for everybody else? The scraps. We’re supposed to believe a kid chooses a program because of its “brand development opportunities” or some other nonsense. It’s a paycheck. Pure and simple. The loyalty is to the highest bidder, not the logo on the helmet. This isn’t college football. This is a free agency period with classes. The portal is just the mechanism, but NIL is the gasoline they poured on the fire. It used to be a violation to buy a player a hamburger. Now, boosters are openly funding salaries and we’re supposed to call it “amateur athletics.” The 1994 Lakers squad that went to the ECAC Bowl, those guys worked summer jobs together. They sweated together. They weren’t checking their bank accounts from some LLC in Atlanta. And the worst part? It’s poisoned the well for the kids who do stay. They see their teammate, who hasn’t earned a damn thing, driving a new car because he has a slick social media deal, while the three year starter next to him is getting by on his scholarship. It breeds resentment in the locker room. It fractures teams. You can’t build chemistry when half the roster is just renting the jersey for a season, looking for the next, better offer. I watch these spring practice reports about Oklahoma State bringing in fifty transfers or Colorado’s traveling circus, and I think of the chaos. That’s not a team. That’s a fantasy draft. The game I fell in love with is gone. It was about the name on the front, not the name on the back. Now it’s a transactional business where the highest auctioneer wins. They’ve made mercenaries out of teenagers,...

You're singing my song, friend. Watching Georgia hoard quarterbacks like that takes me right back to the old Big South days when the big boys would swoop in and pluck a kid we'd been developing a relationship with for years. We had a linebacker in '02, built him up from a walk-on, and he got a last-minute offer from a middling ACC school just to be a special teams body. Broke your heart. That loyalty you mentioned, that chip on the shoulder, that was the foundation. Now, like you said, it's just a transaction. These collectives aren't building programs, they're assembling temporary rosters. It's a shame.

You're preaching to the choir about the problems, but don't you dare lump us in with "everybody else" getting the scraps. We built this program on finding those two-star kids with a chip, and we still do. You think this is new? Georgia's always had the pick of the litter. This is the same song from the 80s when they'd pluck a kid from right under our noses, just the dollar figures have more zreoes now. The difference is, a kid who comes to A&M knows he's coming to build something real, not just wear a hat on signing day for a check. We had guys in the 90s, like that whole '94 team that went to the Pioneer Bowl, who turned down bigger schools to be legends here. That still happens. You're telling me the soul is gone, but the soul was never in Athens or Austin, it's right here in Huntsville. It's in the guys who stay and fight for four years and become Bulldogs for life. This NIL chaos? It might break those spoiled programs that rely on buying teams. It makes what we do, developing men and football players the right way, even more valuable. Let Georgia collect quarterbacks like baseball cards. We'll find our guy, coach him up, and beat you with him, just like we always have.