Nick Saban Yields on Jimbo Fisher, but the SEC’s NIL Debate Isn’t Going Anywhere

The Alabama coach struck a conciliatory public tone as spring meetings got underway, but it’s clear the topic isn’t going anywhere.

DESTIN, Fla. — The first two questions came high and tight to Nick Saban on Tuesday, fastballs under the chin, no off-speed stuff. Olin Buchanan of TexAgs.com, a fan site covering Texas A&M, asked the Alabama coach about The Assertion Heard ’Round College Football. Specifically, he asked Saban what evidence he had that Jimbo Fisher and staff “bought their entire recruiting class.”

“I didn’t really say that anybody did anything wrong,” Saban responded.

Buchanan quickly interjected, “You said they bought their entire recruiting class.”

“I didn’t say anybody did anything wrong, O.K.?” Saban said, a little more edge in his voice. “I’ve said everything I’m going to say about this.”

Saban did add that he shouldn’t have specifically named any schools when discussing the current, flush-with-cash recruiting landscape. Later, he added, “I have no problem with Jimbo at all.”

Saban is in Destin for SEC spring meetings :: Marvin Gentry/USA TODAY Sports

That is remarkably conciliatory. Or, more likely, it is a public stance that does not match his private feelings. This seemed like an attempt by Saban to close the can of radioactive worms he opened May 18.

What Saban said and how he acted behind closed doors with Fisher at the football coaches’ confab here at Southeastern Conference spring meetings might have been altogether different, because Jimbo got very personal and very nasty in response to Saban’s original statements. “Some people think they're God,” Fisher seethed. “Go dig into how ‘God’ did his deal. You may find out about a lot of things you don’t want to know.”

The former Saban assistant at LSU from 2000 to ’04 all but accused the seven-time national champion of cheating and being a bad person—not the kind of thing college coaches are prone to blandly shrugging off. In the course of spewing venom at the coach he labeled a “narcissist,” Fisher issued something of a challenge: “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.”

As fortune would have it, we had two other SEC coaches at the lectern Tuesday who coached with Saban: Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Florida’s Billy Napier. So I asked them whether Fisher’s serious assertions about their former boss were valid.

The answers were vague and reluctant. But neither Smart nor Napier said Fisher was off-base, reckless or wrong.

“My phone started blowing up when Jimbo did his press conference, and I haven’t thought a day about it since,” Smart said. “Because in the world we operate in, we’re worried about what’s in front of us right now—which is, 15 recruits I’m trying to get on the phone. I’m not really worried about a feud between two guys that used to sit in the same staff meetings and have similar conversations.

“At the end of the day, a lot of things get heated. You’d rather it not be in the public arena, but at the end of the day, you guys should be on the headphones sometimes. You’d think that was Mickey Mouse. It’s not something I’ve spent time on. I’m worried about the University of Georgia.”

Next up, Napier: “Coach Saban has been really good to me and my career. I certainly wouldn’t be standing here without him; he hired me two different times. A lot of what we learned, we’ve applied, and certainly going forward we’ll continue to apply. I’m not foolish enough to get caught commenting about that situation—we’ll let those two gentlemen handle that.

“But both are very accomplished, both are competitors, both have conviction about who they are and what they do, which is one of the reasons they’d had success. In this profession there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat, in all the different areas. At the University of Florida we’re trying to get our house in order, and certainly thankful to coach for what he did for my career.”

Fine, fine. Coaches’ backpedaling like five-star cornerbacks away from a spectacular pissing match in their conference is not shocking news. But what the former Saban assistants in the SEC are saying—and not saying—is indeed news. Fisher dragged them into it, suggesting that they knew the real Nick, and that the real Nick is no saint.

(There are no saints anywhere in college football, of course. But the goal has always been plausible deniability—even though it’s widely acknowledged that money has flowed under the table for decades, nobody ever admits that it happened at their school’s table.)

Smart and Napier did nothing to wipe off any of the mud Jimbo threw at the monument to coaching genius that is Saban. There was no rallying to the defense of their old boss. Make of that what you will.

Fisher is not expected to talk to the media here until Wednesday afternoon, when the coaches’ formal role in the proceedings is over. Until he speaks, speculation about whether he’s put down his Saban blowtorch will continue unabated.

A prominent SEC media huckster tweeted a picture of the seating chart for the football meeting that had Fisher’s spot surrounded by league administrators, isolated from the other coaches in the room. Said huckster assumed this was to create a buffer between Fisher and Saban, but associate commissioner Herb Vincent tweeted a correction: “The chair of the coaches group sits with SEC staff. The chair rotates and this year it is Jimbo Fisher.”

There goes one theory.

The league wasn’t silly enough to try to put restrictions on questions to any of the coaches about the Saban-Fisher feud. Nobody here is pretending the eruption of May 18 to 19 didn’t happen. But attention is focusing more on the root cause of the kerfuffle—what college athletes can get in terms of compensation, when, from whom and how much of a role that plays in the new recruiting landscape.

Saban said he’s fine with college football players “making as much as they can make.” But he wants everyone nationally operating under the same rules—and he doesn’t think boosters (and the collectives they fund) should be part of the recruiting process. He has company in the SEC coaching ranks.

Smart ticked off the list of what used to be the most common answers from recruits when he asked them what they were looking for in a college football program: playing time; ability to win a championship; proximity to home; relationship with a coach; etc. “Now it’s more, What can I make on NIL?” Smart said. “What it’s become is probably not sustainable and not good for college football.”

That’s the simmering debate in the sport, and nowhere is that argument hotter than the SEC. As a side effect, it’s led Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher into a feud so public and bitter that it cannot be avoided here this week.