You guys are clearly missing Saban's perceived value to these players

I am in no way sunshine pumping. I am just saying it like it is.

CKD might work out, he might not. But saying coach X would have kept this roster together is laughable.

Or saying we should have just ponied up and paid market rate for another guy to keep him. We were never going to do that.

Equal is better when playing the long game.

Is Texas going to buy a Lambo for everyone on their team? Will OSU or UGA pay a million for everyone?

We'll see.

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CKD will recruit guys that want to play for him and buy into the equal pay now.

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I don't think this strategy is going to work in the SEC where roster talent edges make a huge difference in a league with a lot of pretty solid to great coaches. If this is the Alabama strategy, fans need to lower their expectations dramatically. We are going to become what Dabo has turned Clemson into since NIL. We'll have some nice players but we're not going to have enough of the very best players more often than not.

The very top talent is not going to take a pay cut very often anymore. Not with the conferences raking in billions and schools like Alabama bringing in north of 200m of revenue each year. They know their value and want a slice of that pie even though they should know that pie cannot directly pay out to them right now. When you have a free market, you have to deal with free market problems. One of those is not every good and service is created equal; some have more value and a buyer will offer more money to acquire more value at the expense of other buyers.

Alabama had a very unique situation where our head coach had already established himself as a demigod of sorts in coaching before NIL and free agency emerged. Essentially, players would risk the immediate loss of value to gain access to Saban's modeling for how to be a professional athlete. His personal brand had intrinsic value and UA does not have access to that anymore in any meaningful way for roster management. DeBoer doesn't have that coaching cult of personality edge. He probably never will. Alabama is going to have to compensate players in that loss of Saban coaching value or just accept missing on more top talent than in the past.

Posted this in another thread but it fits here better.
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Reality check - Saban was the draw.

Some of y'all melting over the past five or six days need to wake up and smell the coffee. Hard fact, whether you want to believe it as someone who bleeds crimson or not - the MAJORITY of kids in our program don't bleed crimson. They came to Alabama because of one man. That man is gone. Save all your stuff about him still being there. He's not.

That doesn't mean DeBoer can't build his own great thing, but he's going to have to prove himself as a coach and relationship builder and then he will be the attraction. I know some of y'all want to believe that it's about love of school or pride in University, but it just isn't. The good news for DeBoer is, even with the departures, he's taking over a very good situation.

Kiffin MIGHT could have kept a couple of these kids based on having a prior relationship recruiting the South, but not most of them. Why? Cause Kiffin isn't Saban. Nobody is. The closest thing, as difficult as it is to hear, is the guy in Athens. That is probably the ONLY hire that could have mostly held this together.

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I don't disagree, I think what you are seeing happen at Ohio State with new AD is that they dont think it works either.

Be curious if we stay the course with CKD, or if we change when he struggles to recruit. Only time will tell, but we may be in for some less than stellar classes until this all sorts itself out.

Without Nick, it is a much harder sell. No spin to this. Just facts

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I understand the complication. It is really hard to manage an NIL collective where you have considerable but not infinite money and your cost per athlete is variable. The last thing any school wants is to not have the funds to pay the players. Free market brinkmanship is going to make that day come sooner rather than later. The direct deposits do not hit and most of your roster walks out as an informal strike.

If you're offering fixed payment tiers, you damn sure better hope your staff and facilities provide a ton of value of the players. Even so, you're going to lose out on a lot of the very best talent simply because you have no wiggle to follow the market.

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Is Texas going to buy a Lambo for everyone on their team?

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No.

And actually, they probably didn't buy anyone a Lambo. Every one of those is probably a lease. I doubt seriously that any Texas players were actually given a Lambo.