How Alabama is destroying the Pac-12 in the recruiting game

It’s not enough that Alabama is playing for its third title in the five years of the college football playoff and sixth overall under coach Nick Saban.

The Crimson Tide is also killing the Pacific-12 Conference.

And Alabama is doing that just as the Pac-12 is creating self-inflicted wounds. When Alabama faces Clemson for the title on Monday night, it will be led by a trio of players who are part of an unprecedented migration from West to Deep South.

To put it another way, at some point early in the game quarterback and Heisman runner-up Tua Tagovailoa will hand the ball to second-leading rusher Najee Harris, who will run behind top-rated offensive tackle Jonah Williams.

When that happens, Pac-12 coaches will cringe.

Those three players aren’t just among the best offensive weapons for Alabama. They are part of history. Alabama has nine players on its roster from Western states, including California, Hawaii, Utah, and Nevada. Going back at least 50 years that has never happened for Alabama. While the migration is fed by the Tide’s success over the past 12 years under coach Nick Saban, the Pac-12 has created plenty of its own problems.

Television contracts with FOX and ESPN and a conference network that isn’t carried by DirecTV have left the Pac-12 in a precarious position now and for the foreseeable future. The FOX and ESPN deals force the conference to play its best games at night, mostly on Saturdays. That has led to a decline in visibility for the conference just as Alabama and the rest of Southeastern Conference have risen to new heights.

Longtime sports commentator Rich Eisen summarized the situation with an offhand remark on his show on Nov. 21. Eisen was talking about the possibility of USC hiring Penn State coach James Franklin. Franklin was asked about it and gave a non-committal answer, which Eisen then interpreted. He talked about how Franklin could remain at Penn State and try to claw his way through the hyper-competitive Big Ten.

Eisen then turned on his well-honed deadpan humor, pretending to be Franklin thinking aloud.

“Or I could fly to Los Angeles, live in Malibu, be USC’s head coach and try to take on the Utahs of the world – all due respect – and the Arizonas – all due respect – of the world and play in relative Pac-12 After Dark anonymity and cash it in.”

Pac-12 Vice President of Communications Andrew Walker countered that criticism.

“Of course, the time zone presents a challenge,” Walker said. “But the fact is that our night games attract significantly more viewers, and more East Coast viewers, than day games because we are able to ‘own’ that window without competition from other games.”

The West fades and the South rises

Eisen’s remark was a broadside at the once-powerful Pac-12. A conference that used to churn out Heisman Trophy winners and national champions is now struggling to remain relevant. The conference has made the College Football Playoff only twice in five years since it started. Going back to the start of the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, the Pac-12 technically hasn’t won a title. USC’s championship in 2005 was stripped after the Reggie Bush scandal.

Even if the College Football Playoff featured eight teams instead of four, as some have proposed, the Pac-12 probably wouldn’t have qualified this year. Conference champion Washington finished the season ranked No. 9 in both the Associated Press and the playoff rankings.

“The conference has taken a significant decline in prestige the past few years,” said former UCLA coach Jim Mora, who coached the Bruins from 2012 to 2017 and is now an analyst with ESPN. Mora noted Washington’s season-opening loss to eventual SEC also-ran Auburn. “I would say when Auburn beat Washington in the first week this season, the Pac 12 lost a lot of credibility for the entire season.”

“Certainly the lack of exposure and quality is starting to take its toll,” said Gary Cavalli, a former sports information director at Stanford who for years ran the bowl game that is now played annually at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Cavalli explained how the late start of Pac-12 games have sapped viewership across the country and limited the number of highlights played throughout the day for the top players in the conference. The lack of a deal with DirecTV means that the Pac-12 Network is seen by roughly only 17.5 million homes around the country compared to 70 million for the SEC Network and 60 million for the Big Ten Network.

“They’ve only made the playoff twice in five years. They were embarrassed in the bowls (in 2017, when the conference went 1-8). It’s a downward spiral that has, frankly, extended to other sports like basketball. When you’re competing to recruit players and you’re not getting the exposure for those players … if mom and dad can’t watch me on TV, that’s a problem,” Cavalli said.

It’s a problem Alabama has exploited with its recent dominance, getting players from states that were Pac-12 strongholds for decades. Over Saban’s 12 seasons, Alabama has recruited 21 players from Western states. That’s almost two per year. Over the previous 38 years, Alabama recruited a total of 31 players from the West, an average of less than one per year. In 28 of the past 50 seasons, Alabama had either one or zero players from the West.

Alabama isn’t just getting quantity, it’s getting quality. Tagovailoa, Harris and Williams all were five-star recruits and six of the nine players from the West are either four- or five-star players. Tagovailoa came in to trigger Alabama’s comeback win in the national championship game last season. He dominated this season until an ankle injury hindered him at the end. Tagovailoa is the first player Alabama has recruited from Hawaii other than kicker Peter Kim in the 1970s.

This year, Alabama is again listed as having the No. 1 class in college football by 247 Sports. The top four spots in the ranking are all SEC schools. The only top 10 school from the Pac-12 is Oregon at No. 6.

“There is no question that recruiting is as competitive as ever and that leading football programs recruit throughout the country,” Walker said. “There is every indication that this trend will continue.  At the same time, our schools continue to hold their own in terms of recruiting and continue to attract top coaches and invest in fantastic facilities and programs. While the results have not been there the past couple of years in terms of the CFP, we feel confident in the direction of our schools’ football programs.”

The recruitment of Tagovailoa was obviously aided by Saban hiring Tosh Lupoi as defensive coordinator. Lupoi was named the best recruiter in the country in 2010 by Rivals.com when he worked for Cal and then Washington.

Harris may have been more important than Tagovailoa in the grand scheme. Harris was the National Player of the Year as a senior at Antioch High in California in 2016. The 6-foot-2, 230-pounder was recruited by every major school in the country and seemed a natural fit in USC’s tradition of great running backs. Instead, Harris committed to Alabama after his junior year in 2015, a move that stunned college football and proved that Alabama’s reach had extended well beyond its traditional standard.

Under Saban, Alabama has nearly doubled its reach for players, according to expert recruiting analyst and consultant David Bartoo of CFB Matrix.

“There is what we call a ‘recruiting radius,’” Bartoo said, referring to the average distance a recruited player lives from the school. “When Saban first got there, his average player who signed a Letter of Intent was within 260 or 270 miles of the University of Alabama in one direction or another. Over the years, he has expanded that recruiting radius to more than 500 miles.

“Saban has the capability to reach wherever he wants now because of his brand. For the Pac-12, the No. 1 brand in the conference has been down, down, down for a while now. USC should have the same brand and reach as a big school like Ohio State or Alabama, but it doesn’t. In fact, under Clay Helton, the reach has gotten smaller … They used to be able to go anywhere and get a kid at will, whether it was Detroit, New Jersey, Texas, wherever.”

A conference of lightweights

For all excitement regarding Tagovailoa and Harris, getting Williams has its own significance. Williams not only was one of the top linemen in the country in high school, but he’s also one of four 300-pound offensive or defensive linemen in that group of nine players. Pac-12 schools now have the fewest 300-pound players on average among the Power Five conferences. Pac-12 schools currently have only 149 300-pound players, an average of 12.4 players per team.

The ACC (193 300 pounders) is next with an average of 13.8.

The Big 10 (206) has an average of 14.7.

The Big 12 (149) is at 14.9.

Then comes the SEC with a staggering 17.9 300-pound players per team. That’s nearly 50 percent more than the Pac-12 schools. While Utah and Washington lead the Pac-12 with 18 300-pounders each, seven SEC teams have at least 18.

“Football is a big man’s sport, especially when you talk about controlling the line of scrimmage,” Mora said. “When Alabama comes in and takes the best linemen or Ohio State gets (310-pound guard Wyatt Davis) out of St. John Bosco in Southern California, that’s a big deal … it’s something you can just see with your eyes.”

While the size issue is clearly visible to the likes of Mora and Rick Neuheisel, who spent 20 years coaching in the Pac-12 and has also discussed the problem, what impacts the Pac-12 most is what people can’t see. Between the TV contracts and the network distribution problem, even people who should be watching are not.

In 2015, Stanford running back Christian McCaffrey obliterated Barry Sanders’ all-purpose yardage record by 614 yards (3,864 to 3,250). McCaffrey gained more than 2,000 yards rushing and also dominated as a receiver and returner. He then lost to Alabama running back Derrick Henry in the balloting for the Heisman Trophy. During a press event at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York before the ceremony. A Heisman voter approached McCaffrey to shake his hand.

The voter said: “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I heard about what a great year you had, but I never got to see you play.”

That helps account for the fact that the Pac-12 has won only one Heisman the past 13 years and finished second five times (McCaffrey, Andrew Luck twice, Toby Gerhart and Bryce Love).

In the meantime, Alabama is not only winning championships (five under Saban), it is winning Heismans. Henry and Mark Ingram have taken the award home and Tagavailoa nearly did it this season. That continues to feed the power of Alabama at a time when the Pac 12 is in crisis.

Six years ago, Pac 12 Commissioner Larry Scott was hailed for the 12-year, $3 billion television rights deal he negotiated. It was unprecedented — for a year or two.

“We were all happy with what Larry was able to get because it gave us all a chance to spend some money, build facilities we badly needed and expand our programs,” said former Washington State Athletic Director Bill Moos, who is now at Nebraska of the Big Ten.

But …

“I don’t want this to come off as if I’m bashing Larry because what he did was impressive at the time. But the money the other conferences are getting now is substantially more and the reach of the Pac-12 Network is not what a lot of people had hoped for because of the problems with DirecTV,” Moos said.

In February, the SEC announced that each of its schools would get $40.9 million in payouts from TV contracts. That leads the Power Five. The Big Ten and Big 12 are next at $34.8 million per school. There is a huge drop to the Pac-12 at $29 million and then the ACC at $27 million. Adding to that problem is that the Pac-12 deal is locked in for another six years while every other conference will renegotiate in that time as rights fees continue to climb.

Alabama has used the financial windfall to create a football factory that compares to most NFL teams. The Crimson Tide has built a training facility on par with the best anywhere in the country. More than that, the team has a full-time staff that numbers 36. That includes 11 coaches, 10 analysts and 15 administrators who are solely working with the football program.

The administrators include people who specialize in personnel, recruiting and football operations. That doesn’t include the trainers and medical staff devoted to the team. Along with other staff, there are approximately 65 employees in the Alabama athletic department who spend the majority of their time with the football team.

By comparison, UCLA has only 17 people who work full-time with the football team, including 11 coaches, and another dozen who spend most of their time with the team. All told, UCLA has less than half the number of staff devoted to the football team.

“The lack of exposure is tied into so much more,” Mora said. “There’s a lack of financial advantages compared to the SEC and other conferences that hurts you in a lot of areas. It puts you behind in recruiting, in academic support, facilities, psychological services that your players need, what kind of living situation you can provide in terms of dorms.”

That’s to say nothing of the cost-of-living differences between West Coast regions where USC, UCLA, Stanford, Cal and Washington are located compared to the Deep South. That difference has a huge impact on being able to hire top head coaches and assistants.

“Where the Pac-12 is really behind is with top assistants, the offensive coordinators and defensive coordinators,” Bartoo said.

The spiral could continue

There are some within the Pac-12 who fear it is becoming a version of the Big West Conference or, worse, the Western Athletic Conference. The WAC dropped from prominence and eventually dropped football after the 2012 season. The WAC was best known for its wide-open style of play, but rarely made a dent in the national football landscape.

Others believe this is just a natural progression that will turn around someday. Dick Vermeil, a former head coach at UCLA and with three NFL teams, pointed out that UCLA and the West dominated basketball for much of the 1960s and 1970s. With coach John Wooden running the Bruins, the school won 10 titles over a 12-year stretch and had every major player in the country clamoring to play there.

“We’ve seen this kind of thing happen … it’s cyclical,” Vermeil said. “Give (Saban) lot of credit for what he’s doing right now. He has it going on. Kids from everywhere want to play for him.”

Perhaps, but there is still the lingering issue of the TV contracts and exposure for the Pac-12. Again, the contracts with FOX and ESPN don’t expire for another six years and there seems to be no end in sight to the standoff with DirecTV.

“Our Pac-12 Networks is committed to continuing to seek new distribution partners, both traditional and non-tradition,” Walker said. “Over the past 18 months as an example, we have signed three Over-the-Top deals with Sling, Fubo and DAZN (the latter in Canada) that allow anyone with an internet connection to access the Pac-12 Networks.”

While Scott recently received a contract extension from the Pac-12 school presidents, numerous athletic directors and coaches are grousing about the hole they believe he has put them in.

The problem is that to get out of the late time slots for prime conference games, Scott has told athletic directors that the conference would have to give money back to the networks. That’s not appetizing, making the TV deals essentially a gilded coffin.

“They are lagging behind and kind of are at a crisis point. It’s just reality,” Cavalli said.

It’s a problem that has put Alabama on a completely different level, as Vermeil somewhat humorously pointed out to Mora in 2014. In back-to-back weeks during spring practice that year, Vermeil visited UCLA and Alabama. UCLA ended up finishing No. 10 in the country that season and Vermeil recognized the talent Mora’s team possessed during those early practices.

He also had a good idea what Alabama had after seeing the Crimson Tide at work.

“I’ve known Jimmy since he was a kid, so I said, ‘Jimmy, you have a nice team, a really nice team,’” Vermeil recalled. “Then I said, ‘Jimmy, don’t schedule Alabama, they have men.’ They looked like the Kansas City Chiefs out there.”