Winners hate losing at anything. Whether it’s friendly golf matches that turn sour, back-room games of poker, or something even sillier and less consequential, the biggest winners often turn into the largest babies when things don’t go their way.

This is really the crux of Nick Saban’s beef with Jimbo Fisher after Texas A&M finished ahead of Alabama in the 247Sports Composite recruiting ratings, with the Aggies boasting the strongest class not only of 2022, but all-time. While Bama finished a mere 0.73 points behind the Aggies in the final score, Saban was ready to unload with both barrels and cry foul last Wednesday night when the coach told a gathering of business leaders that his SEC rival “bought every player,” using name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, while insisting his team did it the right way, adding “We didn’t buy one player, all right?”

Saban’s comments started a furor, and it wasn’t long before Fisher fired back, getting personal by calling Saban a “narcissist,” mockingly asserting that Saban thinks he’s God, and even challenging the notion of Saban’s greatness, adding “He’s the greatest ever, huh?When you’ve got all the advantages, it’s easy.”

Is this simply a case of two old friends bickering like kids on the playground, or is there something deeper behind this battle over recruiting? That’s where this gets complicated.

The landscape of college football is changing

There is no question that NIL deals are in the best interests of players. It finally gives collegiate athletes a way to earn money from their talents, offering a small, but important safety net in the event of injury, or failing to make it to the next level.

This year marked the first where NIL deals played a role in recruiting, and the entire process was nebulous. While the NCAA issued clear statements which established that boosters could not guarantee recruits NIL deals prior to signing with a school, those guidelines didn’t exist when schools were on the recruiting trail. A report from Stewart Mandel of The Athletic back in March detailed how one 2023 five-star recruit was given a guarantee of an NIL deal totaling $8 million. Neither the player, nor the school were mentioned in the piece — though it should be noted that as it stands Texas A&M does not have a commitment from a five-star recruit in 2023. However, USC has three already, while Notre Dame, Penn State, Tennessee and Alabama each have one.

It’s clear that NIL deals will play a role in recruiting moving forward. This simply legalizes the practice of paying players under the table which has existed in varying degrees for decades, codifying it in a way that democratizes the system and allows more teams to engage in pay-for-play, even the NCAA refuses to admit it.

Saban is clearly worried about this becoming the new normal

Remember when I said that winners hate to lose, at anything? It’s here that part comes in. See, Saban and Bill Belichick are often lumped together because they fit the coaching taxonomy of “grumpy football robot.” These are guys who don’t like to make waves in the media, so if they choose to make a wave, it’s for good reason, at least in their minds.

Alabama dominates recruiting. Bama having the top class is so reliable you can almost set your watch by it. In fact, in the last 10 years there has only been one other time Saban didn’t finish first in recruiting, 2018, and even then it was almost by design. Saban chose to only recruit 23 players, and composite rankings normally reward larger classes.

However, 2022 was a shocker. After all, Alabama was coming off a National Championship appearance, they won the SEC, their 2021 recruiting class received the highest score ever. Sure, maybe Georgia would push them, but nobody in their back yard was going to beat out Nick Saban, right?

Jimbo Fisher did.

At least on paper there’s no tangible reason Texas A&M should have been able to out-recruit Alabama. Naturally, Saban cleaned up recruits in his own state, much as Fisher did in his — but A&M went into Florida, made huge inroads in Tennessee, into Georgia, neighbor states of Alabama which have been as critical to the Crimson Tide’s success as keeping everyone off their lawn at home.

Fisher was able to convince kids from all over Alabama’s recruiting ground that they should come and play for a team that went 4-4 in conference over a perennial powerhouse. Sure, this could be because Jimbo Fisher has a sparkling personality we’ve never really seen, or Saban’s assertion is correct and there was some NIL funny business going on.

Either way, Saban making a public declaration like this is out of character. He’s a calculating technician who tends to let play do the talking, so for him to single out Texas A&M and Jimbo Fisher like this was more about the coach risking the appearance of weakness to try and make a point to the NCAA. And make no mistake, it came off as weak. When you’re swinging down at Texas A&M in May and trying to justify your class to prominent businesspeople in Alabama it really feels like Saban is looking to make excuses early, whether or not that was the goal.

Texas A&M was an easy foil, but there’s more here too

Saban was talking to his people in his state, so he needed someone to make an example out of — but this was personal. Not just about A&M, but with Fisher. These are two men who both grew up in West Virginia and worked together at LSU. They were close friends up until Fisher took the Aggies’ job and started talking smack about Alabama as a way to rev up his team and his boosters. Then the relationship between the pair cooled. Now Saban and Fisher are football rivals, but even considering that an athletic director at a Power 5 school anonymously told ESPN there’s more going on here.

“Everybody knows Nick is very smart. There’s a reason he’s doing this. It’s almost like for him to do this, A&M is a serious threat or even bigger. I think he sees this as an existential crisis. He can see it, and unless something changes, that’s his way of saying you guys gotta do something. I think he sees this as man, this gap could potentially close, and he’s trying to ring the alarm.”

So this AD thinks it’s not just Saban being upset he got beat, but demanding his boosters and his community step up to the plate so this doesn’t get out of hand. The Alabama coach would later apologize for singling out Fisher, but the damage has already been done — and the biggest statement made: He doesn’t want to be left behind.

There’s never been parity in recruiting, no matter what Saban believes

The trickiest part about what Saban is advocating for is a return to a complete absence of parity, while claiming he’s for fairness. I don’t blame the guy. I think anyone would want the system to stay the same if it allowed them to dominate for the better part of two decades.

However, NIL deals, both public-facing and privately agreed to, are a great equalizer. Everyone knows top recruits have been getting paid for eons, but NIL allows it to take place in a way that won’t garner as much suspicion. If we went back 6-7 years and found a languishing team suddenly out-recruit Alabama there would be mammoth calls for investigation, now it’s just the lay of the land. Any school with a modicum of success can reasonably expect to land top players if they have the backers with the pockets to make it happen. As Saban said in an appearance on SiriusXM Radio:

“I think the issue in college athletics in general now is the whole system of collectives and people raising money to basically pay players to come, whether it’s to come to their school or pay the players that are on their team.”

If anything, the new normal is more honest. It acknowledges that players are a commodity, treats them as businesspeople with representation, and allows them to negotiate what’s in their best interests now, and in the future. This is vastly more fair than a landscape where players are essentially asked to believe in a handful of magic beans about their NFL prospects, and an envelope of money under the table.

So really what Saban is getting at isn’t that he’s worried about the state of the game of a sanctity of college football — it’s that he’s concerned a new game has emerged that his school isn’t ready for. The only thing Saban loathes more than losing is being out-smarted, and when it comes to the recruiting class of 2022, Alabama was unprepared.

The remarkable part of all this is that such a complicated and nuanced issue played out with two grown men trading insults. When Saban is hurling insults at opponents this early in the calendar, there’s always more than meets the eye.