Three years. THREE YEARS since the portal exploded and we still have people acting like Oklahoma State bringing in 50 transfers is some kind of brilliant strategy. Fifty players in one offseason. That is not building a program, that is running a fantasy football league with helmets. Back when Coach Dooley was here we might bring in two or three junior college kids in a whole recruiting year and we thought that was aggressive. Now these programs are turning over their entire roster every twelve months and calling it progress.
I look at what Colorado is doing with 43 transfers and I just think about the 1982 team that won the SEC with guys who had been in the system for three and four years. They knew the playbook in their sleep. They knew which way the lineman was gonna lean on third and short because they had been practicing next to him since they were freshmen. You cannot buy that chemistry in a spring window. You cannot download that trust from the transfer portal. It takes time and it takes loyalty and neither of those things matter anymore.
Now we have the portal window eliminated starting this year and I am supposed to be happy about that? All they did was condense the chaos into one window instead of two. The problem is not the timing, the problem is the whole system. Kids sign with a school in December and by March they are already in the portal because the NIL deal at the next place is fifty thousand more. I watched the 1980 team go through spring practice with the same 22 guys who showed up in August and they won a national championship because of it.
The NIL revenue sharing cap at 20.5 millin is just gonna make everything worse. Now schools have a budget and they are gonna treat players like line items. You underperform for three games and your money goes to the next transfer. That is not college football. That is minor league baseball with better uniforms.
I will take our approach every time. Bring in the high school kids who want to be Bulldogs and let them grow up in the system. We landed a nice quarterback recruit for 2027 and that is how you build. You start with a kid when he is 17 years old and you teach him what it means to play between the hedges. You do not go shopping for a mercenary every time you lose a game. That is not how you win in November. That is how you win in the transfer portal rankings and nobody hangs a banner for that.