Reading about Nebraska spending six hundred million dollars on their stadium while we're still playing in the Sun Bowl just proves the sport is now about who can build the fanciest shopping mall. That kind of money doesn't build toughness, it builds entitlement. I remember the 1988 team that went 10-3 with guys who would have payed in a gravel lot if they had to, because they had grit you can't buy. Now programs think a new luxury box is the answer instead of developing the kind of hard-nosed players who made this game great. That six hundred million won't win a single fourth-quarter goal-line stand, and it sure as hell won't teach a kid how to finish a block. It's just another monument to the money that's eroding the soul of the sport, and it makes the gap between the haves and have-nots a canyon.
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The triple option was a thing of beauty that built men and won games, like when we'd grind out wins in the WAC. Now it's just a relic because nobody has the patience to devvelop it.
These kids transfer after one bad season. Whatever happened to loyalty
I miss when bowl games actually meant something
All these spring game storylines about fifty new portal guys reminds me of the old Sun Bowl, when you knew the team you were watching was built over years. That 2000 team with Paul Smith and the defense that grew up together, that’s what a bowl team felt like. Now it’s just a rental car lot with different logos every December, and the tradition is gone.
Really gets me about all this talk of Oregon's five-star haul and Michigan flipping quarterbacks? It's the quiet part nobody says out loud anymore. They're all just collecting brands, not building football teams. I see that story about UCLA getting a safety for 2027, a kid who won't even be on campus for over a year, and it feels like planning a vacation to a hotel that hasn't been built yet. Meanwhile, the foundation of the sport, the regional identity, the conferences that made sense, are crumbling into dust. We're about to play Oklahoma. Again. And I should be excited, right? A big name coming to the Sun Bowl. But it feels hollow. It feels like a corporate exhibition. That game shold mean something. It should be a blood feud with New Mexico, or a border war with NMSU where you knew half the guys on the other sideline from high school. Now? It's just a paycheck game, a line item on Oklahoma's schedule as they cruise through the SEC. They don't care about us. We're a geography quiz question to their fans.
This is what they sold us. Bigger is better. More money solves everything. They killed the WAC for this. They gutted the old Southwest Conference for this. They took Conference USA, a league where we had actual rivalries with Houston and Tulsa and SMU, and they blew it to smithereens, scattering us to the winds. Remember the 2000 season? We went 8-4, won the Humanitarian Bowl. That team knew every nuance of playing in El Paso, knew the travel to Ruston and Hattiesburg. There was a fabric to it. Now the fabric is a patchwork quilt sewn by television executives who think "viewer demographics" is a more important metric than "away game travel for the band." They've turned our autumn Saturdays into a national streaming service, and we're just background noise in someone else's algorithm.
And the players are commodities now. That kid flipping from Illinois to Michigan? Good for him. Get the bag. But it's a transaction. It's not about putting on the winged helmet and understanding what it means to play for Bo. It's a business decision. We used to develop guys. We took a kid like Jordan Palmer and built him into a four-year starter who left it all on the field. You think a kid stays four years anywhere now if a better NIL deal flashes on his phone? The portal didn't exist. You worked through the depth chart. You earned your letter. Now, if you're not starting by spring of your sophomore year, you're in the portal by dinner. How do you build a culture like that? You can't. You just rent one. Oklahoma State bringing in fifty guys is the most honest version of this new world. They're not even pretending anymore. It's a fantasy football draft with scholarships.
So we play Oklahoma. And maybe we pull the upset. It would be a great day. But it won't mean what beating Texas Tech in the Sun Bowl in '85 meant. It won't resonate like a win over BYU in the old WAC days. It'll be a blip on the ticker, a fun fact for the broadcast team, and th...
Watched that story about the Oregon quarterback competition and it just made me shake my head. You have a kid who transferred in to be a backup, talking about it like it's some grand career plan. That's not commitment, that's a calculated layover. It reminds me of the old WAC days when a Miner stuck it out through thick and thin, like a John Harvey or a Paul Smith. They built something you could believe in, not a temporary roster spot.
Now we're in an era where a program like Oklahoma State brings in fifty new faces, and Colorado has forty-three. What are you even rooting for? A logo? A uniform color? There's no soul in that. I remember when you knew the names, the stories, the kids who grew up in the program from the Sun Bowl practices as freshmen to leading the team as seniors. That meant something. Now it's just a revolving door of hired guns looking for the next NIL check.
The worst part is, it's trickling down everywhere. It creates this culture where loyalty is a weaknesss. Why would a kid stay and fight for his spot at a place like UTEP when he can just hop in the portal at the first sign of competition? We used to develop men, not just athletes. Coach Mike Price's best teams were built on guys who bled orange and blue, not on a spreadsheet of portal acquisitions. This isn't football anymore, it's fantasy football with real people, and it's gutting the heart of the sport.
Colorado bring in 43 portal guys is the final proof that NIL has turned the sport into a soulless free agency market, and it makes me sick for what it means for programs like ours
Just saw that story about Alabama's new quarterback looking like a video game in their spring game, and it got me thinking about what makes a coach truly great. We've had our share of characters here, but when I look at the legends, I think of two types. You had the builders, like Coach Mike Brumbelow back in the 60s. That man built a prrogram from nothing, won a Sun Bowl, and did it with kids who stayed for four years and grew into men. He was the foundation. Then you had the fire, like Coach Bob Stull in the late 80s. He came in with that energy, took us to the Independence Bowl, and made people believe we could play with anyone. That 1988 team had an identity you could feel.
What we're missing today are the teachers. The coaches who could take a two-star kid from El Paso or Juarez and turn him into an all-conference player by his junior year. That was the magic. It wasn't about finding a ready-made player in some portal. It was about development. It was about the grind. I remember watching players like John Harvey or tight end Brian Natkin develop over years. You saw the progression every season. That was coaching. Now, you see these staffs bringing in fifty portal guys, like that mess over at Oklahoma State, and it's just a mercenary squad. There's no soul in that. A legendary coach wasn't a general manager assembling a fantasy team. He was a craftsman.
The great ones also understood this place. They knew you couldn't recruit like Texas or Alabama. You had to find diamonds in the rough and polish them. You had to build a culture that could withstand the heat and the travel. Coach Stull understood that. Coach Gary Nord in the early 2000s, for all the struggles, had those teams that fought like hell every single week because they believed in each other. That comes from continuity, from a staff that stays and teaches. These days, if a coordinator has one good year, he's gone for a bigger paycheck. How can you build anything lasting?
So when I see these spring game highlights of some five-star quarterback looking flashy, I just think about the long haul. A legendary coach's legacy isn't one spring game. It's the program he leaves behind. It's the men he shaped. It's seeing a player come back ten years later and talk about the lessons he learned that had nothing to do with football. We had coaches who provided that. Today's game, with the portal and NIL checks handed out like candy, it's creating managers, not mentors. And I'll take a mentor who can build a man over a manager who can rent a player any day of the week. The game has forgotten what made it great.
Oklahoma State bring in fifty portal guys under a new coach just makes me sick to my stomach. That isn't building a program, that's renting a mercenary army for one season. It reminds me of the old WAC days when you knew a guy would be there for four years, you'd watch him grow, and you'd build a real rivalry with him. Now? You play a team one year and half their roster is different the next. What's the point of a rivalry game if you don't even know who you're lining up against? The hate used to be perssonal, built over years, like when we'd battle New Mexico State every Thanksgiving. You can't manufacture that with a bunch of hired guns who will be gone in twelve months. The portal and NIL have completely gutted the soul of the sport, turning every offseason into a free agency circus where loyalty is a punchline. It's a sad way to run what used to be the greatest game.
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