Just saw the news about us flipping Brody Pfannenstiel from Texas Tech and I have to sit here and laugh a little bit. Not at the kid, he looks like a good get, a long athletic edge rusher who could develop into something. But the way we talk about recruiting now compared to how it used to be done around here is night and day. We used to find these kids at the Wisconsin high school state tournament or hear about them from some assistant coach who saw them playing 8-man football up in the northwoods. Now we are flipping kids from Texas Tech and celebrating it like we just won a national title in June.
You remember when Barry Alvarez would go into a kid's living room and the whole pitch was you will play in the Big Ten, you will get a degree that means something, and you will run the ball downhill until the fourth quarter when the other team quits. There was no NIL collective putting together a package. There was no fancy recruiting weekend with helicopter rides and steak dinners. We offered you a scholarship and a chance to earn a spot. If that was not good enough, fine go to Michigan State and see how that works out for you.
Now we are sitting here at No. 24 in these 2027 rankinggs and I am supposed to feel good about it. We are behind Notre Dame who is loading up on top 300 prospects like they are collecting baseball cards. We are behind programs that have been in the dumps for years. And the whole system is built on who can flash the most cash in the portal era. The kid we just got from Texas Tech probably had three different schools trying to pull him before he even finished his junior year of high school. That is not recruiting. That is bidding.
I think back to the 1993 Rose Bowl team and how many of those guys were three star kids from the Midwest who just wanted to hit somebody. Mike Verstegen was a walk on from a small town. Joe Panos came here because he wanted to play for a coach who would push him. We did not need to flip anybody from Texas Tech because we were developing our own. That is what made this program special and we have lost that edge somewhere along the way.
I get it, the game has changed. You cannot win without the NIL and the portal and the big recruiting budgets. But I miss the days when a kid committed to Wisconsin because he wanted to be a Badger, not because the collective put together the best offer.