Gets me thinking about how recruiting used to be on a Sunday evening in the dead of summer, back when you actually had to build relationships with kids and their mamas over years, not just flash a bag and a transfer portal promise. ESPN can post all their 100 days hype pieces about Oregon stacking five 5-stars and crowning them the next dynasty, but let me tell you something. I remember sitting in Legion Field in 1992 watching us beat Florida for the SEC Championship and thinking, every single one of those boys on our roster was a project. Coach Stallings took there-star kids who wanted to be here, kids who grew up dreaming of running through that tunnel, and he molded them into champions. That whole 92 team had maybe two or three blue-chip guys total. We won the natty with a roster full of kids who would be portal fodder in today's game.
You see this new NIL revenue-sharing model they are talking about, caps at 20.5 million per school, and everybody thinks it is gonna create parity? All it does is formalize what we already knew. Recruiting is just a bidding war now. There is no loyalty, no development, no watching a kid grow from a freshman special teamer into a senior captain who bleeds crimson. Back in the 80s and 90s, we would find a linebacker from a town you never heard of, put him through four years of Bear Bryant's offseason program, and by his junior year he was eating offensive linemen alive. Now a kid shows up for spring practice, does not win the starting job by the second scrimmage, and he is in the portal by April. The spring window being eliminated is a start, but the damage is done.
I watch what Indiana did winning that national title with a bunch of transfers and I just shake my head. That is not how you build a program. That is how you rent a roster for one season. We built dynasties here. We built decades of excellence. The 1979 team that won it all had seniors who had been in the system for four years under Coach Bryant. They knew the system, they knew each other, they knew what it meant to wear that jersey. You cannot buy that chemistry. You cannot portal your way into a culture. Oregon might have all the 5-stars in the world right now, but I want to see them in November when the weather turns and the games matter. I want to see if those rented mercenaries care as much as the boys we used to develop.