Wait so ESPN drops their top 10 receivers list for 2026 and I scroll through it three times trying to find a singe Alabama wideout and I keep coming up empty. Not one guy from our program made that list. And I sit here on a Sunday afternoon in June thinking about how we used to do things and I just get this sick feeling in my gut about where recruiting has gone.
I remember when Coach Bryant would roll into a small town like Thomasville or Gadsden and find some raw kid who had never even been to a football camp. He would watch him play six-man football on a Friday night and see something nobody else saw. That kid would show up in Tuscaloosa not knowing a single route tree and by his junior year he would be catching touchdowns in the Iron Bowl. We developed players back then. We built them from the ground up. You did not need a five-star rating from some recruiting service to tell you a kid could play. You put him in the weight room with Coach Cochran and you taught him how to run a curl route and you waited three years for him to be ready.
Nowadays it is all about who can put together the best highlight tape by their sophomore year of high school and who has the biggest NIL bag waiting for them. I look at the 2026 recruiting rankings and I see Oregon with five five-star kids and Georgia sitting at number one and I just shake my head. These kids are getting paid before they ever take a college snap. They are committing to schools they have never visited in person because some collective promised them a car deal. And if they do not start as a freshman they are in the portal before Thanksgiving.
The thing that really gets me is how we used to build relationships with these kids and their families over years. Coach Stallings would go have dinner at a recruit's house and sit in the living room and talk to the grandmother about how the boy would be taken care of. Now it is all done through text messages and Zoom calls and agent negotiations. You lose that personal connection and you lose the loyalty that comes with it. That is why you see guys transferring three times in four years.
I watch what Coach Saban built here and I know it cannot last forever in this environment. The portal killed continuity and NIL killed loyalty and the combination of both is turning college football into professional free agency with a jersey swap. We used to have guys like Antonio Langham and David Palmer who stayed four years and became legends. Now you get a kid for one season and if he has a good year he is gone to the NFL or chasing a bigger NIL deal somewhere else.
I do not know how you fix it either. The new revenue sharing model caps at 20 million per school and that is supposed to create parity but all it does is formalize what was already happening under the table. The old way was better. You recruited off film and character and you developed talent over time and you built a program that lasted. Now you build a roster every single offseason through the por...