Wait so Florida is back in the national conversation after a four win season and suddenly they are a top 25 team? That tells you everything about how the sport works now. You go 4-8, bring in a bunch of transfers nobody wanted two years ago, and suddenly CBS Sports has you ranked. Back in the late 70s we had Coach Gregory take a team that went 2-9 the year before and grind them into something respectable through two a days in the August heat and old school weight training. Not by buying a roster off the clearance rack. The whole system is backwards now. Rebuilding used to mean something. It meant loyalty and development and earning your stripes. Now it means who can swipe the most credit card numbers in the portal window.
A former Ohio State player is suing the Big Ten and the NCAA and you know what, good for him. This whole system is a joke now. We used to have a kid from Welch, West Virginia show up to Bluefield State in 1988, walked on, paid his own way for two years, earned a scholarship, and never cmoplained once. Now these kids sign a contract for a bag of cash and if they don't like their playing time they lawyer up and sue the conference. The NCAA brought this on themselves when they opened the NIL floodgates and the transfer portal turned every roster into a free agent market. You cannot have a sport where players are employees one minute and amateurs the next. Pick a lane. Either we are college athletics or we are the minor leagues. This lawsuit nonsense is just the next chapter of the same mess.
You want to talk about coaching, fine. Let me tell you what a real coach looked like. Back in the early 80s we had Coach John Gregory, and that man could take a group of kids from coal towns and textile mills and turn them into a team that would run through a brick wall for him. He didn't have NIL money or a transfer portal. He had a chalkboard, a whistle, and the ability to look a kid in the eye and tell him exactly what he was going to become. Now every coach is a CEO managing a roster that changes 40% every year. Gregory would have walked off the field before he recruited a kid who was just shopping for the highest bidder.
Remember when a rivalry game meant something because you actually hated the other school's colors and their band and their fans in the stands? Now you've got kids who played for three different programs beforre they ever even suited up for a rivalry week. We used to circle the CIAA schedule every fall and you knew exactly what you were getting from the other side. No transfer portal defections the week before the game. No NIL bidding wars for their star player after they torched us for 200 yar...
The SEC had 87 players drafted and they want a trophy for that? Back in 1985 we had three guys from Bluefield State go in the late rounds and every one of them started for a decade in the league. Quality over quantity. That 87 number just tells me they had more bodies, not bet...
You want to know the real difference between now and when I started watching this program in the late 70s? It's how we built a roster. We used to recruit like we were building a family, not a fantasy football team. Coach would drive down to Grundy or up to Welch on a Tuesday night, sit in a kid's living room, drink coffee with his mama, and talk about what it meant to wear the Big Blues jersey. You earned that jersey. You didn't swipe right on it through the transfer portal because some NIL colletcive offered you a better deal than the school down the road.
I remember the 1984 season when we brought in a kid from Richlands who nobody wanted. No stars next to his name, no recruiting service had him ranked. Coach saw him play in a mud bowl game and offered him a scholarship based on how he carried himself after a loss. That kid started for four years, never missed a practice, and still comes back for homecoming every fall. You don't get that anymore. Now a kid commits to us in June, decommits in December because Oregon's collective threw an extra twenty grand at him, and we're left scrambling to find a warm body for spring practice.
Recruiting the old way meant something. You watched a kid play for two or three years in high school. You knew his coaches, his pastors, his uncles. You knew if he could handle a loss without blaming everybody else. You knew if he'd show up for 6 AM winter workouts when it was 18 degrees outside. That's how you built a program that lasted. Not by throwing money at a transfer who's already been at three schools and will leave the second things get hard.
The 2026 recruiting class is full of five-star kids who've been recruited since eighth grade, and half of them will transfer before their sophomore year. That's not a program. That's a rental agreement. We used to build something permanent. We built men who bled for this school and this town. I'd take one kid from a coal mining town who wanted to be a Big Blue over ten portal mercenaries with highlight tapes and zero loyalty. Every single time.
This whole system is broken. The portal killed the soul of recruiting and NIL turned it into a shopping spree. I'll die on that hill.
Drew Allar never met the recruiting hype they said. That kid was the number one quarterback in the country coming out of high school and he just got drafted in the fourth round. Back in the 90s we would have taken a kid like that and built a program around him for four years. We would have taught him how to read a defense and take a hit and throw the ball away when nothing was there. Now they just call him a bust and ship him off to Pittsburgh. The whole system is broken when a five-star recr...
Wait so the NFL Draft is happening and nobody is talking about how the option offense would still work in modern football? I watched Keldric Faulk go to the Titans and all I could think about was how we ran the triple option back in the early 90s under Coach Schuler and nobody could stop it. You watch these spread offenses today and its all sideways throws and RPOs that take three seconds to develop. The option forces defenses to be assignment sound on every single snap. We used to grind team...
Walk on culture is dead and that breaks my heart. Remember when a kid from Grundy, Virginia showed up unannounced, slept on a training room table for two weeks, and ended up starting for three years under Coach Harris in the 80s? Now they just swipe into the portal. That kid e...
Gets me about all this NFL Draft hype and Mel Kiper's Big Board nonsense? These kids today have no idea what it felt like to sit in those old wooden bleachers at Mitchell Stadium on a crisp October afternoon. I can still smell the hot dogs and hear the groan of those planks when we'd all jump up for a big play. We didn't need mock drafts or portal rankings. You knew a player was special because you watched him grow from a freshman to a senior, not because he sshowed up f...
They’ve completely forgotten what a bowl game even means. It used to be a reward for a season’s work, a trip somewhere special for the guys who bled for the program. Now it’s just another exhibition game for a bunch of mercenaries who will be gone next year. I remember the feeling when we earned a trip to the Pioneer Bowl, that was an achievement. These kids today will never know that pride.
Just read about Sam Leavitt's portal saga. That kid has had more homes than a traveling salesman. We used to build quarterbacks for four years, not rent them for one.
Just saw that kid decommit from Illinois and flip to Michigan for the money. This is what NIL has done, a bidding war for a high school junior. Back in the 80s, a man gave you his word and that was it.
The greatest coaches in history built programs with their own hands, not with a shopping cart full of transfers. You look at a man like Lou Holtz, who took over a dormant South Carolina program and built it brick by brick, teaching fundamentals and discipline. That CBS Sports piece linking him and Spurrier gets it right, they were architects. Now you’ve got these new guys bringing in fifty mercenaries overnight, like what’s happening at Oklahoma State. That’s not coaching, that’s fantasy football with NIL money. A real coach develops the young men he recruits for four years, like they did here in the 80s. You can’t buy a culture, and you sure can’t portal your way to a legacy. The legends are rolling in their graves watching this.
They talk about rivalries now, but they don't know what it means. I remember when we played Virginia State in the Pioneer Bowl and you knew every guy on the other sideline because they'd been there for four years. Now with this portal nonsense, you need a program just to identify the mercenaries liinng up across from you. The hate isn't real anymore, it's just a transaction.