Two big-time SEC coaches made headlines last week for exchanging some pretty fiery words (and Deion Sanders got caught in the crossfires, too!). The topic at hand? Name, image, and likeness and its impact on recruiting.

Here's the background: it all started when legendary Alabama football coach, Nick Saban claimed that Texas A&M head coach Jimbo Fisher “bought every player” in his current recruiting class with name, image and likeness deals and therefore, engaged in dishonest recruiting practices. For some reason, Saban also alleged that Jackson State head football coach, Deion Sanders, “paid a guy a million dollars last year” to play for JSU, a claim that Sanders staunchly denied on social media, tweeting “I don't even make a million!” Fisher also held a press conference to address Saban's allegations last Thursday morning to address Saban's allegations which you truly have to see to believe.

Ok, let's get back to Nick Saban. Neither of his claims are easily provable but his disdain for NIL has been echoed by other high profile football coaches, including Dabo Swinney and Kirby Smart. But let's give Saban the benefit of the doubt and act like universities truly are “buying athletes” with lucrative NIL deals (and that paying players to attend particular universities isn't a massive NCAA violation). How is it any different than what universities did to lure in recruits before NIL was a thing?

Related: Want to Make it Rain? Check Out the Top 5 States in NIL Rankings

“Buying athletes” with NIL deals, in my opinion, is really not all that different from universities blowing huge sums of money on flashy facilities to attract recruits like the University of Alabama itself has been doing for years. For example, in summer of 2020, amid the budgeting cuts that the coronavirus pandemic brought to athletic departments across the U.S., Alabama Football's Twitter account tweeted pictures of its brand locker room and stadium renovations–all for the low, low price of $107 million!

Related: Rate your Coaches, Facilities, and Campus Visits

Now, you may be wondering: were those renovations actually a strategy to draw in recruits? Or do Power Five universities just like to buy their athletes nice things out of the goodness of their hearts? To find the answer to that question, look no further than Alabama's Crimson Tide Foundation's website, which states a key goal of its massive 10-year, $600-million funding plan is to “transform our facilities and provide the environment necessary to recruit and train the best student-athletes and position our programs as nationally competitive in the future” (which sounds a whole lot like a NCAA inducement to me!).

So yeah, colleges “buying athletes” is nothing new, they've just done it in a roundabout way. And, NIL or not, it's likely going to continue, at least at the University of Alabama, for quite some time.

To be clear, it's not just Alabama who's luring in college athletes with state-of-the-art facilities. In 2017, Clemson University built a $55-million-dollar locker room that included a bowling alley and a slide. In 2019, LSU finished its $28 million locker room renovations that included a mini-theatre, sleep pods, and a pool. More recently, in 2021, Auburn University released plans to install flight simulators in its locker rooms (right next to a barber shop and a recording studio) as a part of its new Football Performance Center that cost $91.9 million.

With this in mind, it seems like all of these universities are thinking like the Crimson Tide Foundation and the goal of constructing such lucrative buildings and renovations is clear: build the best facilities to attract the best athletes. It's a little sketchy, and so is a booster promising a high school athlete (aka a minor) a business deal to attend their alma mater. But at least with NIL, the athletes directly benefit.

Katie (M.K.) Lever is a former Division 1 athlete and current doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies NCAA discourse and policy. She is also a freelance sportswriter and creative writer on the side. She is the author of a new book Surviving the Second Tier available on AMAZON. Follow Katie on  Twitter and Instagram: @leverfever.

Have an idea for a story or a question you need answered? Want to set up an interview with us? Email us at [email protected]

* Originally published on May 23, 2022, by Katie Lever, Ph. D