After hearing stuff about how he left, kinda surprised to read this when the Tide came to Cleveland.

“When I was at Ohio, I spent a lot of time developing, and they did a great job helping me be the player I am today,” Sears said. “I have some experience coming to Cleveland because we’ve been the past two times. One of those times, we had won it all here and the other time, we fell short. OU, I love it. That’s a part of me.”

“What he did at Ohio, particularly in his second year, was pretty remarkable,” Oats said. “When I got to Alabama, we kind of had our first few practices, me and the assistants that came from Buffalo with me to Alabama. We had quite a few kids at Buffalo that could have played here, really helped us. Kind of looked at what Mark was able to do in that league. That’s a really good league.”

So what happened?

They didn't interview Mrs. Sears.

Good stuff.

Many feel differently, but I watched a lot of Alabama over the last few years and was always excited to see him perform on that stage.

This is the world we live in now - we're a development league. Embrace it or don't. If we don't then we miss out on the next Mark Sears, and I would be extremely sad to never have these guys at all.

Sell your strengths, getting a Mark Sears and helping develop him into an NCAA All-American... we should be posting congrats and good luck and whatever else. I want to steal that thunder and use it to our advantage. Sour grapes are only sour to us.

Pretty good stuff in this post. As a fan you basically have three options - long for the Norman Dale era and go play golf, complain and moan when a player leaves and fantasize about "what if" or embrace the reality of today and watch sports all day long. I'm not sitting as close to Norm as Shooter did but I did hit 75 balls at Golf Galaxy today. Nice post sir.

I agree with all of this. And we've had exactly two players that the leagues above us in the pecking order have felt are good enough to take from us. And one was after 4 years with our program.

The reality is that the transfer portal just hasn't been a problem for a program yet. Seems like it would be a good problem to have if we had so much P5 talent that we were struggling to keep our roster intact year in, year out.