You want to know what gets me fired up every spring when I see these transfer portal guys walking into the facility with their highlight tapes and their bag of NIL promises? The walk on. The kid who shows up unannounced, pays his own way for a semester, bleeds in practice every day, and earns his spot the old fashioned way. I think back to the 1992 squad and I can name you three walk ons who ended up being special teams demons and one who started for two years on the offensive line. We used to have a culture where a local kid from a small Alabama town would rather suit up for the Crimson Tide and never see the field than go start somewhere else. That meant something. That meant the jersey meant more than the playing time.
Nowadays you got kids entering the portal three times before they finish their sophomore year and nobody even knows what a walk on is anymore. The staff brings in these portal offensive linemen and I understand you need bodies, I really do, but I cannot help but wonder if there is some kid in Tuscaloosa County right now who would run through a brick wall for this program and nobody is even looking at him because they are too busy chasing five stars from California who will transfer out the second somebody offers them a few more dollars. We had a walk on in the late 80s named Van Tiffin, you might have heard of him, kicked the kick that beat Auburn in 1985, and he showed up unrecruited. Just showed up. Walked into Coach Perkins office and said I want to kick for Alabama. That does not happen anymore. That whole pipeline is dead because the portal killed it.
The spring game used to be the day where you would see some unknown walk on make a play and the whole stadium would go crazy because that kid earned it. Now the spring game is just a showcase for the transfer quarterback and the new portal wide receiver and everybody is looking at their phones to see who is hitting the portal next Monday. I miss when a kid had to earn his stripes. I miss when you knew a guys name because he stuck around for four years and became a leader, not because he had a slick edit on social media announcing his commit. The walk on culture built the backbone of this program for decades and now it is just gone, replaced by a free agency system that treats loyalty like an old wives tale.