Wouldn’t Be Great If We Could Somehow Drag Gene Stallings Into This?

Nick Saban. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Oh, do I love college football.

If I haven’t made it clear in previous posts I’m an absurd partisan in favor of the glorious Crimson Tide. Some want to be non-partisan and pretend that when they write about the college game they come from a neutral position and garner respect as a dispassionate observer. We all know that’s nonsense. Everybody has a rooting interest and hiding it is lying to readers. I prefer to confess my proclivities. It makes me feel like a British tabloid. Leave pretend objectivity to the broadsheets.

So, let’s be upfront. Alabama’s Heisman winning quarterback is going to have a better year than last this fall. Sarkesian is a brilliant offensive mind but by the second quarter our first real test, The University of Texas, will do what every opponent past them on Alabama’s schedule will do – give up the blind side. Will Anderson is too fast. To stop him is to double up on him and that frees others. We are stout against the run. Barring injury, three second drop to pass and all that’s left for our opponents is a lucky over the middle mismatch, a screen, or a right-side smash rout. That’s a set up for a pick six (unless the defense has Chavis on staff.)

We are going to do very well next year.

Our Dark Lord and Master, Nick Saban, has a verbal tick. He says “all right” as a placeholder. I wrote about “Polymetic Odysseus” on these electronic pages before. Those who speak publicly develop pauses to collect themselves. Nick Saban says “all right,” but not really. He says “Aight” so often that I suspect that al.com and the Tuscaloosa News have already altered their auto-correct to just glide on by “aight” because it’s such a portion of a Saban press conference that the electricity expended retyping the meant from the should have meant would rival the needs of a small but interesting and bikini clad island nation.

Have you ever heard of Omerta?

It’s a Sicilian thing. It’s a measure that is associated with organized crime but is separate from. Omerta is, at it’s most basic, an Italian conception of the individual versus a power structure. It asks you to handle things on your own but more importantly it demands that you appeal to no authority. A sub legal authority develops in place as gangs, but as a semi libertarian with anarchist leanings I see the force theory of government subletting itself and a headache develops.

If you go against Omerta, you get killed. That’s if you are lucky. You might get your fingers squished or your kneecaps drilled and then get killed as the day goes on. Pick your poisson, because you might be sleeping with the fishes and I know that poisson is French and it would be pesce in Italian but you get a paragraph in your head and commit and only cowards look back when a pun is on the line (That’s one too!). Honestly I don’t know that it is an Italian thing but I’ve read Mario Puzo and picking your poison is a phrase that will drive you crazy because there are links to that asshat Henry VIII and Aristotle but no etymological explanation as to where it came from. Maybe Italian, maybe Greek, maybe English, and if you are a fan of puns there are French connections too. No matter which way, via con Dias Luca Brasi.

Think about the perception of college football recruiting pre last year.

There are a wealthy minority of first round NFL draft picks. There are a greater minority of non-drafted signees that have amazing athletic talent that despite hope and effort don’t make it to a pro roster.

These are coveted athletes, but not all make it in the big league. A second path to football wealth and strip clubs is to be a commenter (I promise I will write an article excoriating the horrid and abusive term “commentator” but I have relatives in town and time is short.) I don’t believe that’s an easy gig to break into. Not every guy who’s taken a snap is a Herbstreit or Reese Davis. The position is unfortunately a meritocracy so an Auburn grad can find a position with ESPN too, but only if you have the talent of a Cole Cublic even though he has a noticeable national championship deficit when compared to his radio co-host who did the honorable thing and played the bulk of his games in Tuscaloosa.

So, if you are an NFL hopeful but suddenly find yourself a bust how do you break into the Davis, Cublic, Herbstreit analyst club? You have experience and knowledge and if you have the ability to speak on your feet your only competition is everybody else who wore pads and didn’t get a deal with the Eagles. What could you do? What huge story could you break as an ingenue, but the guy version of that?

You could talk about how much money you made under the table as a college football player. You could name names and drag all the Bowdens and Sabans and Spurriers and Jimbos down. But nobody has. That should make the curious take note. If college football is the Craig James (who did not kill five hookers) era SMU fest that so many assume it is, where is the social climbing athlete that fell just short of a pick after the NFL combine? We see the occasional report about a former college star going broke. Why don’t they spill the beans? That would be the cover of Sports Illustrated and if the guy is the slightest bit funny, a regular appearance on GameDay and a Kardashian girlfriend.

I don’t think that time travel will happen because there weren’t three billion people in attendance at the Sermon on the Mountain. I don’t think college football is as rancid as we thought because the whistleblowers are thin on the ground and the sales of Saltines hasn’t spiked in my lifetime – at least that I’m aware of.

If college football is anything like it is assumed to be by so many, the Sicilians need to take note, because Omerta aint got nothing on this.

Right now we have an amazing media fight between two of the five active coaches with a national championship ring in the junk drawer. One is pretty sanguine. The other, not so much, and it keeps getting better.

For the non-college football fan, The NCAA went against sage advice and bowed to allowing NIL, or Name, Image, and Likeness. That means that a college athlete can shop him or herself around and do commercials and such. Bad idea, but aight¹.

Alabama’s Heisman winning quarterback reportedly earned just south of one million dollars, US, last year. But he was on the team before a drop of ink was spent on a contract.

Saban said, at a presser for The World Games, that Texas A&M’s recruiting class was bought and paid for while his was not. The rankings for the recruiting classes had A&M at number one and Alabama at number two. The point being that A&M had boosters in line to pay players for ads or such as they signed despite on-field production which should have shocked no one who was watching because that was what we all knew as it happened.

From rollbamaroll.com’s Erik Evans:

“Asking the superficial point first. Of course, Fisher paid off that class. Even as it was being assembled, we already knew the amount of cash going out per-man. And when it was signed, we knew the final tally: about $25 million. We had months and months of coaches pointing out that A&M is paying players. And it was leveled at one, and only one program.”

The estimates for Alabama’s National Championship run last years in NIL? Around $3 million, and again, nearly a third of that went to the Heisman winner.

So Saban pointed out what had already been pointed out and Jimbo went nuts. You have to watch the press conference that Fisher held to realize how mad he was about his widely publicized and totally legal warping of the spirit of the law.

Having done nothing wrong and having been called out for doing nothing wrong, I don’t get Fisher’s rant.

Neither did the Old Ball Coach, which cracks me up. When Steve Spurrier isn’t golfing or abandoning his team mid-season he’s always good for a vicious laden quote. He doesn’t disappoint here.

“I don’t think Saban told any lies in there, so I don’t know what he [Fisher] was mad about. He hasn’t beat much of anybody, but he beat Saban last year. But they [Texas A&M] haven’t won the division or anything since he’s been there.”

Kiffin, former l’enfant terrible but now one of the most amazing coaches in America and one hell of a Twitter follow, was so close to getting in on this and the spectacular glory that could have been is shunted to frustrated speculation.

SEC Commissioner and apparently one hell of a nimble killjoy, Greg Sankey, seems to have silenced the league on this matter. Kiffin was supposed to be on the Dan Patrick Show but the SEC threw down the hammer and he went all Trappist. That would have been a an interview for the age.

Saban apologized, and you can visualize Sankey as one of the two people in the world likely to have Nick’s direct number looking over his shoulder as he did so. Fisher hasn’t said squat, which is a little surprising.

I know a few things. We all heard about how A&M structured their recruiting. It was pretty straight forward. They had a plan to buy players and it was legal. I know that Alabama has Texas A&M at home next season so the Aggie’s will be without the vaunted 12^th man. I know that Jimbo insulted the most decorated coach in college football history and intimated that he’s a cheat. I know that that decorated coach took advantage of the transfer portal that he warned against and has a loaded offense to match his vicious defense. I know we won’t be letting up in the 4^th quarter, cause you don’t talk shit like Jimbo did and walk away. I know that one of the Aggies’ four losses in their traditional eight and four seasons will hit em square on October 8^th.  I know I’ll be watching to see if the coaches shake hands.

Saban also fired off on Deon Sander’s recruiting. Odds on that future Aflac commercials are on hiatus.

I don’t know what Fisher has in his creel but I suspect that the league will vigorously, in the finest Sicilian tradition, put such things to rest and everybody will be aight.

1. There is belief that the NCAA’s move to allow NIL was court directed. I can find no such evidence. Gorsuch’s opinion in the 9-0 Alston case was clear that the decision applied only to educational benefits and not athletic. The concurrent opinion by Kavanaugh (included at the end of the link to Gorsuch’s opinion) strengthens that view by pointing out that there may be successful avenues for further litigation regarding non-educational based payments so further separating athletic benefits from the decision. Pre Alston, the NCAA board of governors had approved measures to explore NIL allowances and NCAA President Emmert had appeared before congress asking for a national policy to avoid him and his staff having to navigate fifty plus policies in fifty different states and DC – probably Guam and Puerto Rico too. The NCAA was ahead of the courts.

   In the aftermath of Alston, Emmert pointed out that the ruling had no bearing on NIL but the NCAA was still working toward making such a possibility.