Last week began as one where potential new schedule formats was the main discussion point inside of SEC circles. It’s why I wrote up a piece meant to help people create their own of the three-permanent-rivals kind.
I only wish I had gotten it out a day earlier, because the night before I hit publish, Nick Saban decided to accuse Jimbo Fisher of buying his recruiting class via NIL. Then Fisher went nuclear on Saban the next morning.
Saban famously mused “is this what we want football to be?” in reference to wide open, hurry-up, RPO-laden offense before rejiggering his attacks to do just that. At the time it seemed like he was complaining. Now, everyone takes that to have been a threat.
Naturally, a lot of folks have taken Saban’s complaints about NIL from last week to be a similar inflection point. I don’t.
Both Saban, through his grousing, and Fisher, through his “the lady doth protest too much, methinks” denials about the importance of money in his 2022 class, display a distinct anxiety about the dawning NIL era.
College football coaches, for better and worse, have always had more control than their NFL counterparts. Pro coaches, at least ones without a combined GM title, don’t negotiate players’ contracts. They often don’t have final say on draft picks. They can’t stop players from leaving in free agency. There are league rules that cover some kinds of suspensions and other punishment.
College coaches choose who they do and don’t recruit. They control whether players’ scholarships get renewed or if an underperformer will be processed out. They are nearly always the final and unquestioned arbiter of discipline. They used to have even more control about whether a player would get released from scholarship upon transfer, which would change how long the player had to sit out.
Coaches have less control than ever in the NIL age. They officially aren’t allowed to collude with collectives in telling them who to make deals with and how to prioritize among them, though I expect those firewalls will be about as porous as the ones between political campaigns and super PACs.
Even so, no one on university staffs can participate directly. The people who run the collectives have to be the ones who actually negotiate and close deals. They could do a bad job of closing on contracts. They could not hit it off as well as the coaches do and cool the interest from or even alienate a recruit. They could do any number of other things that the coaches wouldn’t, and the coaches can’t officially do anything about it.
I don’t think Saban was issuing a veiled threat again because he can’t change the situation by fiat like he could with his offense. He also knows that the kind of class Texas A&M signed is often the cornerstone of a national champion. It’s more of a direct threat than even the Georgia classes that places ahead of his in recent years because the Aggies are in the same division as the Tide.
Plus, Saban himself knows how tough sustaining success is. He makes it look easy, but it’s not. I think you can already see reasons why he might have some worries about sustaining success even after guiding one of the best teams ever in 2020 and making the national title game in 2021.
It’s no secret that Saban’s defenses haven’t on average performed as well as they used to in the last five-to-seven years. No defenses have until Georgia’s last year, or maybe a stray Clemson unit or two, and each of those cases required a handful of players who could’ve gone pro to come back. It’s not sustainable in the current era of offense, and I doubt another UGA defense will touch that performance without a similar number of future pros staying in school a year longer than they should’ve.
Saban hit the jackpot with his receiver recruiting in 2017-18 to an, again, unsustainable level. The 2017 class had DeVonta Smith, Jerry Jeudy, and Henry Ruggs. Then in 2018 he landed Jaylen Waddle and trusty possession guy Slade Bolden.
Since then, only 2019’s John Metchie has performed notably well among Bama’s signed recruits. The Tide had to import Jameson Williams from Ohio State to keep up the pace last year, and when both Metchie and Williams were out of the national title game from injury, the Bama offense looked not that much better against the Georgia defense than Florida’s did. When they did have sustained drives, it was mainly due to either tight end Cameron Latu or running back Brian Robinson.
Bryce Young was visibly out-of-sync with the younger receivers. I figure that getting full spring and preseason practice sessions with them higher on the depth chart will help with that. Even so, Alabama brought in not one but two transfer receivers this year, Jermaine Burton from Georgia and Tyler Harrell from Louisville.
It used to be that you could easily remember Alabama’s offensive transfers because there were so few. Jake Coker was obviously the most notable as the quarterback of a national title team in 2015. The next year they brought in Gehrig Dieter, a thousand-yard receiver from Bowling Green, to be a fourth option and catch a pass a game on average. But that was mainly it for a long time. Players transferred out from Alabama because the depth chart was so stacked, not into Alabama to patch over recruiting holes.
As long as Saban can keep getting top transfers in key spots, it’s all sustainable. Saban can sell excellence and an NFL pipeline at basically every position, and that may be enough. A good second NFL contract is worth vastly more than any NIL deal can be, and you can’t get a second without a first.
However, Saban knows that NIL is a shortcut for programs that don’t have his NFL track record. And if a coach who has high, if not Saban-esque, success can put big NIL figures on top of it, then the empire in Tuscaloosa can be challenged by a lot more people than at present.
After all, the number of coaches who’ve been able to challenge Saban’s hegemony has been short. Les Miles did it for a while, but he never changed enough and fell away as a competitor. Urban Meyer was there, but he could be counted on to burn himself out before hitting a decade in one place. Dabo Swinney did it from a different conference.
Kirby Smart almost exactly does the Nicktator thing in Athens with increasingly similar results, and I think Saban can live with that since the Bulldogs aren’t in his division. He probably also feels some pride at seeing one of his mentees finally replicating The Process. Smart also got there in the pre-NIL days, playing by the same rules that Saban excelled under.
Fisher is different. He is one of the few active head coaches with a national title, but he got over that hump because he had a very intelligent quarterback in Jameis Winston. Winston’s personal judgment was often terrible off the field, but remember that he was also recruited heavily by Stanford. Winston was the rare quarterback able to absorb and perform Fisher’s overstuffed playbook at an elite level.
Jimbo is no threat to Saban’s throne unless one of two things happen. One is that Fisher wises up and simplifies his offense such that mere mortals can execute it, which is a ship that seems to have sailed by now. The other is that Fisher is able to get equivalent or better talent than Saban does. That wasn’t bearing out in College Station until last year, the first of the NIL era.
So, I’m not surprised that Saban lashed out against Texas A&M’s 2022 haul. His program isn’t as obscenely bulletproof as it appeared a couple years ago because it turns out the 2017-18 recruiting classes happened to be all-timers and the leap to unprecedented team quality across 2019-20 wasn’t just due to the strategy shift. Plus, he probably now perceives NIL to have made Fisher a true threat to his rule in a way that he didn’t used to be under the old rules.
This feud is one in which I’m rooting for the meteor, so let them tear each other down all they want. I just think there are some layers to it beyond what’s been put out there so far.