THE SABAN-JIMBO FALLOUT: NIL HAS DONE NIL FOR COLLEGE FOOTBALL
A landscape of bidding wars and lawlessness has further muddled a sport short on integrity, which means those with the deepest donor pockets — Texas A&M, USC — might topple the Alabama dynasty
Wait, was St. Nick Saban just accused of cheating his way to college football’s greatest dynasty? And did the rival coach wagging his long and threatening finger, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, also indict other Saban disciples in the national elite by identifying them as co-conspirators?
“Some people think they’re God. Go dig into how God did his deal. You may find out … a lot of things you don’t want to know,” railed Fisher, who once worked for Saban himself. “We build him up to be the czar of football. Go dig into his past. Or anybody that’s ever coached with him. You can find out anything you want to find out. What he does and how he does it. And it’s despicable.”
The mind wanders. The head explodes. If integrity never has been a hallmark of this racket — as Fisher alleged with shocking candor about Saban (seven national titles), Kirby Smart (reigning national champion) and other prominent hands who’ve aided and abetted the Tuscaloosa machine — just how ugly and nasty has the recruiting landscape become amid the lawlessness of the NIL era? The NCAA is kaput as an enforcement arm, enfeebled by the Supreme Court. Congress isn’t interested in intervention. Coaches are too greedy and boosters too brazen to follow a unified ethical code. This isn’t about Names, Images and Likenesses, people. It’s a money grab, fueled by agents and lawyers chasing young people like ambulances, and stained by $100 million coaches screaming publicly that one’s dirtier than the other.
So what exactly are we watching now on Saturdays, once something of a sacred occasion as young people celebrated being alive? Joy has given way to unlimited free agency for teenagers, fed by open checkbooks, and accompanied by a transfer portal allowing established college players to flee for bigger and richer programs once they’re established. See: Jordan Addison, the college game’s top receiver, who decided Pittsburgh wasn’t cool anymore and fled to USC, which has poached a star quarterback, a star running back, four major receivers and 13 others this offseason. Don’t be shocked if Lincoln Riley, Prince of the Portal, is playing in a game 7.5 miles from campus next January: the national title game, at SoFi Stadium.
Anarchy, it’s called.
Welcome to what’s left of a sport that was given an opportunity to right a longstanding wrong — compensating players with fair, reasonable cuts of a multi-billion-dollar pie — but predictably has degenerated into obnoxious bidding wars and interstate crossfire between coaching pillars. Should the coming season be played in Octagons? Once the courts handed earnings clout to athletes, the process was corrupted by wealthy boosters who formed “collectives” to shamelessly outspend the competition. The new freedom allows programs with the most well-heeled backers to overtake traditional powerhouses that rely on championship legacies, NFL pipelines, sturdy budgets and brand-name eminence.
Alabama, for one. The reason Saban spoke out this week, after Fisher landed the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class, is that he fears his long reign is ending. His program has built-in advantages that he largely has created via relentless winning, but Saban’s list of badass, go-to donors doesn’t match that of A&M, which is fueled by oil money. Nor can he match the deep money pool at USC, where Riley can call loaded boosters and alums in every direction to pay the conga line of standouts who want stardom, sunshine and direct deposits from the Trojans. It’s only the third time in a dozen years that Saban hasn’t brought in the top class. At 70, he evidently has met his match in the sport he has lorded over for decades. It’s spelled NIL, which prompted him to vent at an event with Birmingham business leaders — causing the earth to move in all corners of an industry swirling in radical transformation.
“A&M bought every player on their team. Made a deal for name, image and likeness,” Saban said. “We didn’t buy one player. Alright? But I don’t know if we’re going to be able to sustain that in the future, because more and more people are doing it. It’s tough.”
Was he crying in frustration or begging them for money? A day later, perhaps after realizing Fisher knows where the bodies are buried, Saban redirected his concerns to the raw nature of NIL. “I really wasn’t saying anybody did anything illegally in using NIL. There’s nothing illegal about doing this,” he said. “It’s the system. That’s the issue I have. … I should have just said ‘across the sport.’ ”
But there IS something immoral about handing cash payments of six and seven figures to kids before they arrive on campus. That’s what Saban meant in saying A&M “bought every player” in its class. When conflated, it means playoff berths and national championships can be purchased like luxury cars. Saban prefers to utilize NIL via a modest initial payment to all incoming scholarship players, around $25,000, then allow further chances to cash in as determined by their careers. Quarterback Bryce Young, after inheriting arguably the most prestigious starting gig in college football, made more than $1 million in a Heisman Trophy-winning season — among 25 Crimson Tide players who, according to Saban, made more than $3 million among them. “That way, nobody feels that one player is getting a bunch of money to come here and another player feels like he's not getting anything," he said. “Once they get here and earn it, like a Bryce Young, I'm for them getting everything they can. Then everybody can earn whatever they can earn.”
Yet those are mere pittances in light of reports that blue-chip recruits, including a high-school QB courted by Tennessee, are receiving offers in the $8 million range. Is that a real number? Or a lie spread by an agent? It’s understandable, then, why Saban spoke up. “It's gotten completely out of control and not a sustainable model," he said. “It's to the point where you've got these attorneys, agents calling collectives and saying, ‘Pay my player $100,000 a year,’ and then they want their piece of that. They all want a cut.”
They ask, and they receive. Too many schools are willing participants in the shopping spree. “First would be the people who are being aggressive in this to improve the program,” Saban told ESPN. “Then there are the people who don't really want to do it, but are sort of getting roped into it because they don't feel like they have a choice. And then there are the people who are trying to hold the line like we are and saying, 'OK, we're going to create equal opportunity for players, but we don't want to get into any kind of bidding wars to get guys to come here for money.’ ”
So how do Saban and other coaches combat rivals who want to make it rain? “I don't want to go down that road of bidding for players out of high school. I don’t,” he said. “But if we go through this recruiting class this year and we lose all the players, because they're making $100,000 going someplace else, then what can you do? The hard thing is there are no guardrails on this road. You can do whatever the hell you want, and in the end, most of this is not good for the players. You know, there are some terrible statistics out there about guys that transfer and how many of those guys graduate, terrible statistics on that. And we're enticing a lot of that.”
Blowback to his criticism will continue to be intense and, it appears, damaging to his legacy. The more he accuses others of paying up front, the more he’ll brace for whispers about his own supposed misdeeds through the years. Said Fisher, still rambling on: “Listen, you coach with people like Bobby Bowden and learn how to do things. You coach with other people and learn how not to do things. There’s a reason I ain’t been back to work for (Saban), with opportunities. Don’t want to be associated with it.” When Jimbo invites the media to look under rocks at Alabama, what will be found? What if it’s Fisher’s shifty way of deflecting criticism about his pay-for-play operation? We do know this: None of this back-and-forth is healthy for a sport that never has seemed more sickly when, we’d blindly presumed, the idea of athlete compensation was good for all.
“It's despicable that a reputable head coach can come out and say this when he doesn't get his way or things don't go his way,” said Fisher, who worked under Saban at LSU. “The narcissist in him doesn’t allow those things to happen. It's ridiculous when he's not on top. … I don't cheat. I don't lie. I learned that when I was a kid, if you did, your old man would've slapped you upside the head. Maybe somebody should have slapped him.
“He’s the greatest ever, huh? When you’ve got all the advantages, it’s easy.”
Who knew NIL would be the great equalizer? Until a set of regulations is adopted and universally obeyed, those with the deepest pockets and most willing investors will thrive. What’s scary is, the money sources needn’t be affiliated directly with a program. Did Barstool Sports, the rowdy sports site for bro-dudes with too much time on their hands, do a financial favor for a podcast host in coaxing the top player in the 2022 recruiting class, defensive back Travis Hunter Jr., to flip from Florida State to Jackson State? “Hell, read about it in the paper,’’ Saban said of the lucrative deal. “They bragged about it. Nobody did anything about it.”
Deion Sanders, the head coach at the historically Black university, was as livid as Fisher. “You best believe I will address that LIE Coach SABAN told,” Sanders tweeted. “We as a PEOPLE don’t have to pay our PEOPLE to play with our PEOPLE.” So much for the next round of Aflac commercials starring Saban and Sanders. The duck won’t miss them.
What college football aficionados must figure out, assuming they’re still with us, is this riddle: Who are the good guys and bad guys here? Are there any good guys? Should Saban be lauded as an old-school protector trying to save a sport from a runaway train? Or was he using the appearance to enlist investors? Is he playing a preemptive martyr’s role in case Fisher and A&M, coming off a 41-38 victory over Alabama last season, win again Oct. 8 and slide past the Crimson Tide into a College Football Playoff berth?
Whatever his intentions, he has little chance when everyone else is following the money. “It's our job to create a platform, to create value for the players' future, by getting an education, developing personal habits that are going to help them be successful — and seeing if they can develop a career as a football player,” Saban said. “This is not professional sports. I mean, we have free agency and no salary cap. That's basically what we have, right?
“There's no professional league that has that circumstance because none of them are stupid enough to have it, and that's what we have.”
Stupid is the operative word. Any sport that eats its own is not heading in the right direction. Has God been cheating in Tuscaloosa, as Jimbo says? This is what NIL has accomplished so far.
Nil, as in zero.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.