Just saw that ESPN piece on the five-star recruits and where they're going and I had to sit down. Twenty-one five-star players in this class and you can count on one hand how many are even looking at programs west of the Mississippi that aren't named Oregon or Texas. Back in the late 80s when we had guys like Rodney Allison and the old Southwest Conference days, we didn't have this star ranking nonsense but we knew who could play. We'd go watch a kid from Plainview or Odessa and you could tell in the first quarter if he had it.
Now every single five-star is going to the same six programs and the rest of us are left fighting over portal scraps. Speaking of which, I saw Oklahoma State brougth in FIFTY transfers. Fifty. That's not building a program, that's running a hotel for mercenaries. Eric Morris is a good coach, I remember watching him at that little school up in Canyon when he was tearing it up, but you cannot tell me fifty new guys in one offseason is how you build something lasting. Remember when Coach Spike Dykes would bring in a junior college kid maybe once every other year and we'd act like he was a celebrity? Now it's the entire roster every December.
The portal killed something that mattered. You used to watch a kid grow from a freshman who couldn't find the weight room to a senior who could bench press a truck. You knew their names, you knew their families, you saw them at the United supermarket on 19th Street. Now they're here for eight months and gone. We got a quarterback situation right now that's a complete mess and instead of developing the guys in the building we're scrolling through the portal like it's Amazon. NIL and the portal combined have turned college football into a rental car agency and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.