re: 15 of the Top-100 just signed with 1 school.

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Outside of a few exceptions, no one playing football at a P5 school is doing it so they can get a cheap/free education. That's definitely not that case at schools like Alabama and Ohio State. Functionally, Alabama and Ohio State are NFL minor league teams.

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I mean I don't disagree with you, but the optics are what matter and just slicing 1,000 scholarships will never fly. Especially when the majority of those 1,000 scholarships serve a certain population.

A struggle? Alabama just signed 16 top-100 players! Lol...

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I mean I don't disagree with you, but the optics are what matter and just slicing 1,000 scholarships will never fly. Especially when the majority of those 1,000 scholarships serve a certain population.

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I don't think scholarships should be slashed. I actually prefer moving in the other direction. End the socialism, make it a free market. Allow players to be paid. Amateurism is a sham when it comes to the top tier P5 football programs anyway.

You could still have amateur college football, it just wouldn't include the 5-star and many of the 4-star players, the ones who have enough talent that someone would actually be willing to pay them to play. Who knows, maybe college football would become something more like it used to be, when players actually were student-athletes, not athletes pretending to be students.

That's more than 95% of the other 65 Power-5 schools.....

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Well, it's 90%. So, not far off.

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Yes, Alabama with the greatest recruiting head coach of all-time still generally will recruit in the top 10% of programs even in a down year

But what it shows is even the smallest slip and there are lots of others that will take advantage and drag you down into the abyss.

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I’m honestly not sure what you do, and you don’t have to do anything. The product can keep getting worse and worse and enough people will still consume it.

The playoff has made it worse, and the NIL stuff will also make it worse yet.

Like 85% of the P5 teams aren’t even playing the same game. Not really anyway

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I think the whole "ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE PLAYOFF" and a lot of the moves in college sports that have supported that hurt almost as much as anything else.

I vividly remember as a kid who rooted for Alabama thinking that the ultimate awesome goal for the year was to beat Auburn and Tennessee and win the SEC Title. I didn't even THINK about the national title. And, not to be haughty, but we were frickin Alabama......we'd won a national title 3-4 years before in 1992 and 10 of them before that. Going to games mattered, winning rivalries mattered, the conference mattered. Going to the Sugar Bowl mattered. "Winning the national title" was something that if it was in the picture come late October or November was awesome, but it wasn't the singular focus discussed ad-nauseum from July to December.

Now, every game is about the playoff or positioning for the playoff. Conference realignment has turned leagues into these mammoth creations where you don't even play 1/3 of the teams in your league more than 1 or 2 times every 5 years. Teams don't play their 100-year-old rivals anymore - Missouri/Kansas, A&M/Texas, Oklahoma/Nebraska, West Virginia/Pitt.........and beyond that teams don't play the schools they played every year since they were kids (even non-rivals - Missouri/Oklahoma, A&M/Texas Tech, West Virginia/Virginia Tech, etc). Everything is about positioning yourself for the Playoff (or at WORST the New Years Six). People can't even discuss conference titles anymore without "well what does this mean for the playoff" instead of "hell yea we won the conference title!".

CFB has just turned into the NFL, but only with the stale parts and without the parity. And it sucks.

Profound. Thanks for the tip.

I don't care if Alabama signed the top 25 players at every position of need. We have a whole galaxy of problems before we even think about competing with Georgia, much less Alabama.


Besides, I'll be able to beat the shite out of everyone in EACFB 23 so who cares what happens in the real world

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A struggle? Alabama just signed 16 top-100 players! Lol...

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It's not a struggle for their fans, no. For their administration? No. But for the players and coaches, there has to be a razor thin margin in which they operate to continue to be the best and thats why it's so amazing that Saban's been able to get to this point at all. You remember being 19, 20? Whatever you were doing then, was there always someone coming to outdo you? Every achievement you made, did you celebrate it, or did you see it as a responsibility to level up and work harder? Because no matter what talent these guys have, no matter how highly rated, how fast they are, how high they jump, theres someone coming for their job that either has better skills or more skills. I mean, Alvin Kamara was one of the two best pure athletes Tennessee's had in 20 years maybe period and he didn't even get a sniff. That being said, no matter how well they recruit, they lose. Not very often, but it's not like they've ever threatened the Oklahoma record, and you know that's the final frontier for Nick's ego.