Iowa State's AD Jamie Pollard is absolutely right to be frustrated with us and the SEC over this roster spending nonsense. Let them break away and go do it. You know what we had back in the Alvarez years? We had walk-ons from small Wisconsin towns who would run through a wall for the Blocking Badgers. We had guys like Brent Moss who showed up every day and worked harder than anyone. We didn't need a billion-dollar NIL collective to convince a kid from Florida to come freeze in Madison. We built this program on cheese curds, hard work, and kids who wanted to be Badgers.
Now I sit here reading about Petitti stumping for a 24-team playoff and making it clear that 16 is a hard no. You know what we used to have? The Rose Bowl meant something. The 1994 Rose Bowl against UCLA. The 1999 Rose Bowl against the Bruins again. You earned your way to Pasadena through the Big Ten schedule, not through some committee's wet dream of expanding the field until everyone gets a participation trophy. Now we're arguing over 16 versus 24 teams and the SEC is sitting there with their arms crossed. This is what happens when you let money and TV contracts run the sport instead of the kids and the coaches who built it.
I watch Oklahoma State bring in 50 portal transfers and Colorado haul in 43 guys and I just shake my head. That's not building a program. That's running a free agency signing period every single spring. We never needed that. We developed our own kids. We put them in the weight room with our strength staff and we watched them grow into men over four or five years. Now the spring portal window is gone starting 2026 and people are panicking. Good. Maybe we can get back to actually coaching football instead of recruiting grown men off a website every December.
I just want to watch a football game where the team that blocks the hardest and tackles the best wins. Not the team with the biggest checkbook. Not the team that won the portal championship in May. Give me the old days when we beat Ohio State in 1993 and it meant something because we outworked them in the fourth quarter. Give me that. Everything else is just noise.