ESPN can put out their offseason rankings and award candidate lists all they want but they never factor in what really matters. You know what built this program? Guys who stayed. Back in the 1998 Sun Bowl season we had linemen who spent three years on scout team before they ever touched the field in a game. Now you see a kid have one good spring practice and his agent is shopping his name to the highest bidder in the portal before the summer workouts even start. The portal killed something fundamental about college football and I will die on that hill.
You watch these national writers grade our offseason and they ding us for not landing five portal starters. But let me tell you something about the 2010 Rose Bowl team. We did not build that roster by raiding other programs every December. We built it by developing junior college kids and three star high schoolers who wanted to be Horned Frogs. The loyalty was real. You cannot measure that in any offseason rakning.