Fisher just went Nuclear on Saban
These are all quotes from his press conference today...
-- “Some people think they’re God,” Fisher says. “We build him up to be the czar of football.
-- “Go dig into his past,” Fisher says of Saban.
-- Jimbo Fisher said he ignored Saban’s call today. “We’re done,” Fisher said.
-- Fisher said there is a reason he has not worked with Saban since LSU. “I don’t want to be associated with him,” he said.
-- Fisher said Saban was “soliciting funds from the crowd” in Birmingham before talking about Texas A&M. “When you walk on water, I guess, it don’t matter.”
-- Fisher said he does not know what collectives are doing. “You can call me anything you want to call me. You can’t call me a cheat. I don’t cheat. I don’t lie.” Fisher said his “old man” would have slapped him and “maybe someone should have slapped [Saban].”
-- “It’s despicable for what it does for the sport, and the operations and the way things were done the other way, when the parity was there. ... There never has been parity. Certain people never followed the rules anyway.”
Allegedly*
Hugh Freeze once begged people to send any proof of cheating and the people responded.
Thanks to Jimbo, time for people to start digging around Saban and all his former assistants.
Meanwhile, over at ESPN, they don't know whether to be excited about their flagship conference increasing ratings with the drama or terrified that head coaches in their flagship conference are going to bash their ships into each other on a race to the bottom of the ocean.
I think ESPN would love it if the opposing coaches would have something like a boxing weigh-in where they glare at each other and then have to be held back after many insults.
Don’t let anyone ever tell you nil wasn’t good for the sport. Coaches turning on each other like this is great
Can someone start a streaming channel with these two and an open invite to Dabo? I'd subscribe, with a bowl full of popcorn.
I am enjoying this because we all know damn well that both of these guys have managed money being funneled to players for years, so them getting all mad at each other is hilarious to watch.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Does everyone else read this extremely fast with a little drawal just like Jimbo talks?
Jim Harbaugh: “My third-base remark was the best smackdown of an opposing coach ever.”
Nick Saban and Jimbo Fiaher: “Hold our beer.”
Jimbo: You can't call me a cheat.
He's right. Cheating denotes you get an unfair advantage to win. He's having a hard time with the "to win" part.
Also those AFLAC commercials with Deion and Saban are going to get downright frosty.
Both full of shit but let them fight
Pot meet kettle
Please, gentlemen, you're BOTH assholes.
The only thing I really agree with Saban on in this instance is that I do foresee NIL being tough to control in the coming years. You let the genie out of the bottle. There's no putting it back. Even if you include caps on the figures, you're just going to re-introduce back-alley deals and we go right back to what we were doing before. Not that I inherently have a problem with NIL, but the deals are only going to get bigger and bolder as time goes on. Schools like A&M, Georgia, Alabama, OSU, Clemson, they're all going to keep re-setting the market for what you pay a five star recruit for his services. So I won't be surprised if over the next 10-20 years, nothing has really changed with recruiting. You still have the top players all going to southern schools or OSU because in addition to all of their continued success, now they're also the ones who will pay you the most. Because everyone is afraid to lose that momentum and fall back to the pack.
That being said, Saban is such a freaking hypocrite. Sure, his program could sell itself based on its results, but there is no way you could ever convince me that Alabama boosters weren't getting involved to get kids on campus prior to NIL. Saban may not have had an active hand in it, but there's no way he didn't know it was happening and he damn sure never did anything to stop it. Now you're just pissed that everything you were doing to help you give you a competitive edge is all legal and above board.
There's a reason that only Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney are outspoken critics of NIL. It is a critical threat to their place in the pecking order and where they've been able to cement themselves in the last decade or so. These two programs had the rest of college football in a vice grip. Seven national titles between the two of them over ten years. Now the floodgates are open for everyone else to level the playing field.
Texas Death match!
I think bronxblue is right - Saban's not picking a fight because he's mad; it's 100% tactical. He's baiting Jimbo Fisher into the exact kind of response we saw today. This is not about any personal dislike of Fisher, it's about TA&M signing the highest rated class in history. While he can't do much about that now, he can make the story going forwards Fisher's WWE promo.
I mean, what are you going to say about this if you're a Saban critic? That's he's being a disingenuously self-serving hypocrite who bends the rules in his favor better than anyone else? Big deal, people have been saying that for years.
They can both get fucked.
this is lou henson vs bobby knight hatred / disrespect, and i'm all in for it.
mostly because jimbo thinks he can go toe-to-toe with saban. he's bringing a gun to a knife fight, and saban is still going to cut him. bad.
Wow Jimbo ! Lol. Neither one of these guys will ever have trouble finding their way to the bank. Imagine everyone watching their next game on TV will stay tuned for the post game handshake. Just hope nobody from corporate tries to sell commercial sponsorship for their post game handshake.
Saban created this Bama dynasty with paying players. Eff him in every situation.
You would think that disgruntled former players of cheating coaches would come out and expose them. But it just doesnt seem to happen. You would think that with the history of cheating in college athletics that these juicy stories would come out. I get that if youre the athlete that got paid you wouldnt want it known you cheated, But it seems like other guys on the team would.
Go Blue
This made the front page of the Washington Post