You see Greg Byrne coming out saying he backed the Brinks truck up for Kalen DeBoer and calling it an easy decision and I just sit here thinking about how recruiting used to work in this program. Back in the 1992 season when we won the SEC championship under Coach Stallings we did not need to throw money at a coach to keep him. We had a culture. We had tradition. We had a program that built men not just athletes. Now we are paying a coach like he is a CEO and hoping he can figure out how to manage a roster that changes every single semester.
I remember when Coach Bryant would go visit a kid in some small Alabama town and that was the recruiting pitch. You come to Tuscaloosa and you earn your stripes. You sit behind seniors for two years and you learn the system and by the time you are a junior you know every assignment on the field. That is how you built a championship team. Not by throwing money at a portal class and praying it gels in one spring practice.
Now we have a GM and an NIL collective and a revenue sharing model that caps at twenty million dollars and everybody acts like this is progress. Progress toward what? Toward a sport where kids change schools three times before they turn 21 and coaches get paid more than the athletic director? Greg Byrne can say whatever he wants about DeBoer being the right guy but I want to see him win with players who actually want to be here not just players who got the best offer.
The portal killed the soul of college football. You cannot build a program when your offensive line is eight new guys every year. You cannot teach discipline when a kid can leave mid-semester and play soewhere else in the fall. Coach Stallings would have walked away from this mess and I do not blame him one bit.