* Alabama has about $20 million for NIL money. The schools with more money have two to three times that amount to spend. If Alabama doesn't start winning, they will not be able to compete for top players and will quickly fall far behind regardless of the coach we have.
I found myself really frustrated here a few years back when I was saying how terrible NIL would be and how Alabama wasn't in a good position and I got a lot of push-back on that. I spent more time looking at the finances than most, so perhaps I just grasped the implications more, but there was a lot of "don't worry about it" type of responses when I brought up Phil Knight, Texas, etc...
It's also one reason I was not in favor of this hire. This is a big swing type hire, a change in culture type of hire, a reinvent the wheel type scenario and given the situation I thought that was a unnecessary risk. I took a lot of heat for having Dabo higher on my list, and it's still hard to explain since he's not exactly doing an amazing job, but I thought and still thought if you just handed Dabo the talent Alabama currently has, and the resources Alabama has, he'd put them in the playoffs.
I'd take a Les Miles type, and the reason for that is because there's a relatively short window here to work with. Alabama is at a financial disadvantage and the Saban talent is only good for a few years. Once you've burned through that, you now have nothing separating you from LSU, Florida, Texas A&M, Tennessee, and Oklahoma for example. I just didn't want to see that wasted and unfortunately it seems like that is happening.
Things are fluid though, once things on the University side get going, Alabama will have a significant amount the program itself can put into NIL, which will percentage wise cut into the gap. Once the dust settles I think Alabama will be a top ten program in terms of NIL, but they won't approach the top ones because the money simply isn't there (Phil Knight has spent over a billion, Texas can take in in the neighborhood of 100 million more a year, Ellison bought a 10 million dollar QB for Michigan as a gift for his wife, etc...).
On a side note, I always criticized Clemson to the SEC because their underlying financials are not that impressive either. Without Dabo they'd probably be around a 40th ranked athletic department financially (with him they still fall below Kentucky), and I think that's actually their biggest issue with the transfer portal. You don't want to come out and say "we're broke" but what ever Alabama has, Clemson has a lot less, so he's having to choose between recruits and transfers for example. I also said back then that Clemson wouldn't do well with NIL.
www.espn.com
