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,...