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You and I are sitting right here this time last year, and we were talking about all the changes happening, and you were like, the one thing I would love to just know is I would love to know who's going to be on my team in spring.

So now we're at the place where we don't have the whole post-spring portal. How has that changed the dynamic around your program?

It's interesting. If you say individually to our program,

I think it's changed very little because we didn't lose many guys in the second portal,

and we did not take many guys in the second portal. We have not been a big second portal team.

I think it changed a lot in college football because some teams tried to revamp their roster at that point in time.

So I think going into January from the point, I don't know the exact date, the portal closed,

let's call it January 10th or 15th, whenever it actually closed.

From that point on, man, you could dig deep.

You could actually have connection meetings.

You could do all these things to build your team because you knew that your team was your team. Now, you didn't know about injuries, you didn't know about this and that. We had some new guys on our roster. We had 26 new freshmen. We had eight new portals. So like with all that going on, we had new people, but at least we knew they were ours. And going through spring practice, to me, was much more enjoyable because you didn't have this

big dark cloud brewing of, was he going to be here?

Is his agent going to shop him around?

Is he going to leave?

Is he going to lose transfer hours and not graduate?

Like, it scares me to death dealing with that second one.

And I do have some deficiencies in my roster that we would have gone out and gotten other people. So we gave up something to gain a little continuity. And I think the players have better relationship with each other because they know they don't have the worry, Josh, of, man, should I go? Should I call mom and dad? Like, Coach, where am I going to be out on the depth chart?

Like, quit worrying about that and just get better because running to another school is not going to just save you by doing that. Well, that's what I was going to ask you. I mean, there are a lot of places. Georgia, but pretty much every place probably just went through spring. and at some point on the roster said,

man, I wish we were a lot better here.

And I know if we had a post-spring portal,

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