Just saw Colton Nussmeier commit and I am glad we got a good quarterback prospect, I really am. But I cannot help sitting here thinking about how recruiting used to work when Coach Dooley was running things. We did not have these ranking services telling us who was a four-star and who was a five-star. We had assistant coaches driving around the state of Georgia in beat-up station wagons watching film on VHS tapes and showing up at high school games on Friday nights. Coach Dooley would find a kid from Valdosta or a kid from Thomson who had the right frame and the right attitude and he would offer him a scholarship based on what he saw with his own two eyes.
Now we got ESPN ranking these kids in the seventh grade. I saw the 2027 class rankings and we are sitting there in the top tier and I am supposed to be excited about a kid from Louisiana who has never even been to Athens before he took his OV. Back in the 1980s we built the foundation of this program on Georgia boys who grew up wanting to be Bulldogs. Herschel came from Johnson County and we knew who he was because we watched him run over people in the state championship game. You did not need a recruiting service to tell you that.
Nussmeier might be a fine player and I hope he is. But I watch Oregon stacking five-star recruits from all over the country and I watch Texas A&M buying up the top cornerbacks and I wonder what happened to the days when you built a program on relationships and loyalty. These kids commit and decommit and flip and enter the portal befre they ever play a snap. We used to sign a kid in February and that was it. He was a Bulldog for four years. Now we got to recruit our own roster every single offseason because the portal is always open.
I will be interested to see what happens when these 2027 kids actually put on the pads and play against grown men in the SEC. The rankings do not mean a thing when you are getting hit by a linebacker from Alabama who has been in the weight room for three years. Coach Dooley used to say that stars are for the movies, not for football players. He was right then and he is still right now.