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

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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.