Three years since the playoff expanded and I still cannot get used to seeing these ESPN 100 days pieces without even a mention of what a real program builder looks like. They talk about Oregon and their five 5-star recruits in the 2026 class and I just think back to what Barry Alvarez did with a bunch of three-star kids from Wisconsin and Illinois who wanted to run the ball down your throat and punch you in the mouth for four quarters. That 1993 Rose Bowl team had exactly zero five-star recruits on the entire roster. Zero. And they went out to Pasadena and beat a UCLA team that had all the fancy California athletes and we ran for 300 yards on them because we had something that no recruiting ranking can measure. We had a culture. We had a system. We had kids who stayed for four years and graduated and then went and did real things with their lies.
Now I watch Oklahoma State bring in 50 portal transfers and Colorado bring in 43 and everybody acts like this is just how you build a program now. Eric Morris is going to walk into Stillwater with a roster full of mercenaries who have been at three different schools and we are supposed to believe that is going to work? I remember when we built something the right way. Barry took over a program that had won seven games in three seasons combined. Seven. And he did not go out and raid the junior colleges and the transfer wire. He recruited Wisconsin kids and Midwest kids who wanted to play Big Ten football the way it was meant to be played. He developed them. He taught them. He made them believe in something bigger than their own stats.
The new NIL revenue-sharing model caps at 20 million and everybody thinks that is going to create parity. I will believe it when I see it. All it does is formalize what we already knew. The rich get richer and the kids get paid and loyalty goes out the window. I miss the days when a kid committed to Wisconsin and that was it. You did not have to worry about him entering the portal after spring practice because he was not getting enough targets or because some other school offered him a better deal. You knew what you had. You knew the kid in the weight room in February was going to be the same kid carrying the ball in November.
We have a Thursday night trip to Notre Dame coming up this fall and I will be there in South Bend like I have been every time we have played them since the 1990s. But I will tell you right now it does not feel the same. The magic is gone. The pageantry is gone. It is just two teams trying to figure out which transfers are going to show up and which ones are going to bolt after the season. Give me the old way. Give me Barry Alvarez and a bunch of farm kids from Wisconsin who wanted to prove everybody wrong. That was real football. This is just a business now and I do not have to like it.