It’s this time of year, reading all these mock drafts and prospect lists, that really twists the knife. You see names like Kyle Louis from Pittsburgh or D’Angelo Ponds from Indiana, and it just underscores what we’ve lost. It’s not about those kids, good for them. It’s about the fact that the entire fabric of the sport has been shredded, and the heart of it, the real soul, was in games that don’t even exist anymore. We used to have a calendar, a rhythm to the fall that meant something. The third Saturday in October wasn’t just a date, it was an event you built your whole season around. Now? It’s just another slot in the television schedule for two random super league teams who have no history, no shared pain, no reason to care beyond a conference win.
I think about the old Big South-OVC clashes, the games where you knew every name on the other sideline because they were from the same towns, played in the same high school all-star games. The rivalry wasn’t manufactured by a TV exeuctive in a boardroom. It was born in bus rides to forgotten towns, in muddy fourth-quarter stands, in a trophy that was actually fought over instead of just being a corporate logo. You knew a kid would be lining up across from you for three, maybe four years. You developed a hatred that was pure, that was earned through countless collisions. That’s what built legends. That’s what made a Thursday night in November feel like the most important night in the world, even if the rest of the country wasn’t watching.
Now, with this portal free agency and the conference map looking like a toddler’s scribble, what are we even building toward? You bring in fifty transfers like Oklahoma State is doing, or forty-three like Colorado. You play a team one year, and by the time you see them again, half their roster and maybe their coach is different. The continuity is gone. The narrative is gone. How can you have a true rivalry when the characters change every single act? It becomes a faceless contest. It’s just a uniform against a uniform. The passion came from knowing that guy across the line was the same one who got the best of you last year, and you had 365 days to simmer on it, to work on that one move to beat him. That’s all been erased in the name of player movement and television dollars.
They’ve traded our history for their future, and it’s a hollow, plastic future. They talk about parity and super leagues and playoff expansion, but they’ve killed the very thing that made people care in the first place. The game was in the buildup, in the tradition, in the shared history that only two communities truly understood. Now it’s just content. And reading these draft lists, seeing all these players from all these scattered programs, just reminds me that the system that produced them has made the regular season feel meaningless. We used to play for pride, for our neighbors, for a chance to ruin our rival’s year. Now everyone’s just playing for a highlight to get a better NIL deal ...