Last week’s SEC meetings were a pretty big dud as far as news goes.
We did get to make up conspiracy theories about the seating chart at least, which was fun for an afternoon. Eventually folks noticed that the coaches were merely put in alphabetical order by school name, which took some of the wind out of the sails. My conspiracy at least survived that, in that I pointed out how they sat Jimbo Fisher and Nick Saban in spots where eye contact between the two of them would’ve been the hardest. They could’ve started the order at any point around the table they wanted to, after all, but they still kept them separated as best as can be done.
Anyway, Saban and Fisher did their best to kill talk about the feud between the two. Saban I’m sure was glad to do it, since he probably was only meaning to fire up his boosters to open their wallets for NIL money and went too far in the moment. Fisher I think was happy to bury the story too. His two theatrical denials of anything improper or unusual in his recruiting class — once on signing day and again after Saban’s comments — were actually meant to kill the story dead. Despite talking a lot about NIL and his 2022 class, he really and truly doesn’t want to talk about NIL and his 2022 class.
Billy Napier, for his part, handled things like a seasoned pro. He made an appearance on Finebaum, and PAWL tried to get him to take bait on the Saban/Fisher thing twice with no success. Billy’s a pro, you guys.
Finebaum closed with a question about NIL, and Napier essentially embraced UF doing a lot there without saying a lot one way or another about how he thinks about the topic. He’s mentioned elsewhere that he thinks players should be able to make money off of their NIL rights, so it’s not like he was playing coy or anything.
However as a few people have pointed out, NIL is here to stay. It’s written into (a patchwork of) state laws, and no court is going to overturn that legislation. If someone plans on being in the game for decades to come, he has to embrace NIL because it’ll be around for the rest of his career.
Saban can grouse about it since he has comparatively less time to go than a guy in his mid 40s, and he’s prominent, successful, and adaptable enough that nothing’s going to knock him off his perch until he retires or dies in office. But someone like Napier? In his first P5 job, at a place that has a quick hook for coaches who underperform? You gotta say nothing but positive stuff about it because there’s nothing to be gained by being known as an NIL grinch.
The schedule question would’ve been good to get some clarity on, but it’s far too early for that. The conference took two years after the expansion to 14 teams to set a rotation, so it’s a thorny issue for the conference to say the least. The word is that things remain as reported by SI’s Ross Dellenger not long before the meetings began: two factions supporting either an eight or nine-game schedule. Either way, divisions are toast because there will be a combination of permanent opponents and rotating games to make sure everyone completes a home-and-home with everyone else every four years.
I get why schools like Kentucky and Arkansas want an 8-game schedule. I do. They really care about getting to bowl eligibility, and it’s hard for them to guarantee it.
Those schools aren’t the only two in that camp, but I singled them out because as of Sam Pittman’s new extension they both have head coaches who get automatic extensions for winning seven games in a season. Yes, seven games.
I was a bit surprised that Arkansas went for that. UK, being a basketball school, would of course be grateful for a coach who can consistently manage to keep football from being an embarrassment. I thought Arkansas’s aspirations were higher than that, but maybe with the impending addition of Texas and Oklahoma to the conference, they can read the writing on the wall.
There is a zero percent chance that the SEC ends up with the 1-7 format with eight games, one being a permanent rival and the rest rotating. Too many important series would no longer be annual in that case. You may not care about Alabama-Tennessee (I sure as heck don’t), but enough powerful people do that it will always be annual. Always. And the Iron Bowl ain’t going by the wayside again (check the history, there was a long break in the series for dumb political reasons), so 1-7 is a non-starter based on just Bama alone.
So I guess we all have to pretend for a while longer that there is suspense in the scheduling format — there isn’t, it’ll be a 3-6 format — and that Saban and Fisher have reached a truce — publicly, maybe, but those dudes have way too much money and pride to make up this quickly. All the while, Napier keeps looking like a levelheaded dude who’s wise beyond his years. I have no idea how he’ll work out as a ball coach in Gainesville, but he’s the type of person I could get behind for the long haul.