Three years. THREE YEARS we have been hearing about these "under-the-radar" lists and every time I see one I think about the 1999 team that nobody saw coming. We had a walk-on defensive end from some Texas 2A school nobody ever heard of who ended up leading the conference in sacks. You know why? Because he earned it. He showed up every day in August when it was 105 degrees and the turf at Amon Carter felt like a griddle and he just kept working. Nobody needed a national website to tell us he mattered. We saw him in practice. We saw him in the fourth quarter against Rice when everyone else was cramping up and he was still chasinng the quarterback.
ESPN puts together this list of 25 players across the top teams and I scroll through it and I see names from Oregon and Georgia and Ohio State and I just shake my head. Back when I started watching this program in the late 70s we didn't even know what a recruiting ranking was. You found players because your assistant coach had a cousin who taught at some high school in Wichita Falls and he said hey there is this kid who can really hit. That was it. That was the scouting department. And you know what? We found some absolute ballplayers that way. LaDainian Tomlinson came out of nowhere. Nobody had him on any list. He just showed up and ran for 2,000 yards and changed the entire program.
Now everything is about who has the biggest NIL bag and who can flip their commitment three times before signing day. The portal killed the whole concept of building something. You used to watch a kid develop from a skinny freshman who couldn't bench 225 into a junior who could knock your helmet off. Now if a kid doesn't start by week three he is in the portal shopping himself around like a free agent. The 1998 Sun Bowl team that beat USC had guys who had been in the program for four and five years. They knew the playbook backwards and forwards. They knew each other's families. That is how you win. Not by throwing money at a transfer who is going to leave the second someone offers him a better deal.
I look at this list and I wonder how many of these "under-the-radar" guys are actually gonna be at the same school in two years. Probably half of them will be in the portal. That is not how you build a program. That is not how you build a culture. Coach Patterson used to say that you earn your stripes in the weight room in January, not in the transfer portal in April. And he was right. He was always right about that stuff. The game changed and not for the better.