Reaping the whirlwind

 There's something deeply comical about college football coaches squabbling over what they have wrought. You don't know whether to laugh or feel pity when a Nick Saban accuses a Jimbo Fisher of buying players, and Fisher gets all outraged and fires back.

Neither, apparently, seems to get that thus has it ever been. The difference now is the NCAA can no longer punish poor Whatsammata U. because Texas landed some blue-chip stud with a 280Z and a no-show job.

These sorts of shenanigans have been going on forever, and because of that the NCAA became hoist by its own petard. For decades it punished the little guy to make it look as if it were Enforcing The Rules, while looking the other way when the big-ticket programs did what they did. TV dough made college athletics a business driven by shaky ethics, and finally it collapsed from the weight of its own contradictions.

You can't pay a football coach $10 million a year, after all, and claim it's all about education. You can't call 'em "student-athletes" to get around the sticky wicket of compensation, and then turn the "student-athletes" into billboards for their university's multi-million dollar apparel deals.

The second you do that, they become employees of the university. Period, end of sentence.

And so now we have Name, Image and Likeness deals for those "student-athletes," and because the NCAA rushed the whole thing willy-nilly into being, boosters are using it the way they used to use cars and $1,000 handshakes. And Nick Saban is whining that it 'taint fair.

He's right that the NIL thing is out of control, but Saban's the last person who should be complaining about its unfairness. The idea that he's a straight shooter who never bought any of his incoming recruits, while Fisher is a sleaze who bought his whole No. 1 recruiting class at Texas A&M, is not an idea with much traction. 

Especially when you offer not a scrap of evidence to support your accusations. Which Saban didn't.

But he played the white knight here because, well, he can get away with it. He's at Alabama, after all. That gives him a leg up on outbidding everyone for talent, even if he doesn't call it that.  

And when you don't outbid everyone?

Well, then you crybaby about it because you don't like seeing a playing field that for once isn't radically tilted in your favor. And you say dumb stuff like accusing Fisher at Texas A&M and Deion Sanders at Jackson State of buying players, while soft-soaping the fact your incoming class brings with it $3 million in NIL deals itself. 

Saban got around that by saying 'Bama did it the "right way", whatever that means. After all, that $3 million surely was enhanced by the fact it was Alabama -- and don't think that wasn't a selling point when Saban or one of his assistants sat down in some kid's living room.

So what's the difference between Alabama and  those "cheaters" at A&M, Jackson State and Whatsamatta U.?

You tell me.