Alabama Is Sounding Desperate When It Comes To NIL Funding, AD Pushes For Fans To 'Fight Back'

The Alabama football program can longer just rely on Nick Saban to land some of the top players in the country, whether that be the transfer portal or high school recruiting. So to do that, they need to get more involved in the NIL game, which athletic director Greg Byrne discussed today in an email to Crimson Tide fans. 

While we have seen programs across the country raise massive amounts of money for NIL purposes, Alabama has tried to play the game of ‘prove it, then we’ll pay you' over the last number of years since the Name, Image and Likensss inception. 

But long gone are those days of just being able to rely on the name, or patch on their jersey. For Alabama, they are playing from behind in a lot of aspects of NIL recruiting, while schools like Ole Miss, Ohio State, Tennessee and others passed them by in the early days. 

Unfortunately for Alabama, it's caught up to them, and athletic director Greg Byrne is now pleading with fans to help the cause, citing other schools have the Tide' in their sights and are trying to poach players with high-dollar offers. 

"Over the past few years, there have been drastic changes in college athletics," Greg Byrne wrote on Wednesday. "We have been careful during this transitional period to protect our position at the top of college athletics while being mindful to listen, engage and learn from our generous supporters, proud alumni and unrivaled fans to make sure that we protect our great traditions here at Alabama. But there’s a time for talk and a time for action. Now is a time for action.

"Although we have been competitive from an NIL standpoint, our competition has us in their sights and are actively trying to surge ahead with NIL. You have heard examples of other teams using promises of million-dollar paydays to lure away our players or convince them not to come to Alabama. It is time for the Bama Nation to fight back."

Former Alabama coach Nick Saban watched as his former team defeated his former assistant coach Kirby Smart on Saturday night in Tuscaloosa Via: Trey Wallace

Alabama Is Sounding Desperate For NIL Help From Fans

Yea, that doesn't sound like someone who has been at the forefront of NIL, this sounds like an athletic director that knows they've been slacking and is looking for help, quick. 

While LSU has been promoting a ‘match offer’ from head coach Brian Kelly, and Florida State has redirected almost $4 million of Mike Norvell's contract to future NIL funding, Alabama is pushing its fans to invest more into the product. 

"A subscription to @yea_ala isn’t about the now; it’s about the future," Greg Byrne wrote."It’s about roster retention for future seasons – keeping our legends in Crimson. It’s about attracting and developing the best recruits in the country to represent the script A. You being a part of the team has never been more important."

What he's also doing is trying to convince Alabama fans to invest into their subscription-based program that will help the school keep players from leaving the program. Sure, this might work for the short term, but to have a sustainable presence in the NIL world, you need a number of mega-boosters who are willing to shell-out the cash needed to buy these players from the portal, or high school ranks. 

Before Nick Saban retired, it was all about playing for the greatest coach in college football. But now that he's gone, and Kalen DeBoer is trying to build a program, Alabama is finally realizing that the ‘Saban Discount’ is gone, and money does actually talk. 

Greg Byrne proclaimed that Alabama was the standard in his statement, which was the case when Saban was around. But now, they are playing second-fiddle to programs that took NIL seriously when it was started. 

The Tide' better get to selling those subscriptions, because other programs are pushing out a lot of money to compete for championships in this new era of college sports.