Alabama Football: Cost of Attendance Money Won't Help or Hurt Tide's Recruiting
ATLANTA — It’s not hard to see what this offseason’s major issue and talking point will be in college football.
It’s not going to be satellite camps or graduate transfers or uptempo offenses (is that still even a thing?).
This coming season, for the first time, schools will be able to provide athletes with the “full cost of attendance,” more than just the standard tuition, books and room and board.
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According to ESPN.com’s Mitch Sherman, writing at the time the measure passed, most student athletes will receive an extra “$2,000 to $4,000 annually.”
And therein lies the problem. Schools will be able to determine their own cost of attendance, which could lead to inflated numbers in the name of recruiting.
Depending on who you ask, Alabama’s extra benefits will likely fall somewhere in the middle of the SEC. Tuscaloosa is a reasonably inexpensive place to live, and UA is an average state school, cost-wise.
The Crimson Tide shouldn’t feel a big effect in recruiting from the legislation, regardless of where their final number falls. Nick Saban and Alabama won’t be that much affected by the rule.
Still, Saban isn’t happy about the ramifications.
"To do it the way we did it is going to be a nightmare," he said this week before a Crimson Caravan stop in Atlanta. "We've spent 100 years in the NCAA trying to make everything equal. So no extra benefits, nobody could get something that somebody else couldn't get. All right. Now you leave it up to the institution, and I think some people have manipulated their numbers because they've significantly changed from last year to this year, and that's not the spirit of the rule.
"Everybody has, historically, from an academic standpoint, tried to keep the cost of attendance down. It's a benefit to the students. It's a benefit to their scholarships. Now all of a sudden it's going to be different, and I don't think that's good."
The Chronicle of Higher Education attempted to calculate what these numbers could be for the 65 wealthiest NCAA institutions using some back-of-the-napkin math. They used “a review of institutions’ financial-aid websites and cost-of-attendance figures that the colleges report to the federal government” to determine the cost.
The Chronicle set Alabama’s full cost of attendance at $27,434, fourth in the SEC. But Alabama’s “difference in scholarship,” extra money that goes to cover that full cost of attendance, was $2,892, which put it at No. 10 in the conference.
Those estimates, though, are just that: estimates.
When Saban was asked about the effects of being in the bottom half of the league, a UA spokesman stepped in and said those numbers weren’t accurate and that Alabama hasn’t yet set a number for its cost of attendance.
Saban and Alabama shouldn’t worry about disparity in numbers affecting his recruiting, though, at least in the short term.
He’s pulled in a No. 1 class to Tuscaloosa the last five years, according to 247Sports.com.
| 2011 | 1 | 3 | 16 |
| 2012 | 1 | 3 | 15 |
| 2013 | 1 | 6 | 12 |
| 2014 | 1 | 6 | 15 |
| 2015 | 1 | 6 | 14 |
Alabama is winning consistently and sending players to the NFL at a breakneck pace. It has first-class facilities, major tradition, an already legendary coach and a gigantic and passionate fanbase. Those things won’t change.
Most recruits won’t turn that down for a few hundred or a thousand extra bucks a year, if they are even aware of the differences to begin with.
USA Today’s Dan Wolken asked a handful of coaches who told him most recruits this year didn’t ask about cost of attendance or even know those benefits would be available to them.
Other coaches don’t think it will have much of an effect, either.
“I know there’s going to be much differing in the number of the cost of attendance, but at the end of the day, a prospective student-athlete really chooses that school based on the relationships they have built,” Tennessee coach Butch Jones said, according to CoachingSearch.com’s Chris Vannini.
“We haven’t had much questions asked about total cost of attendance. Really, at the end of the day, it comes down to things that are most important.”
“At the end of the day, some of those factors always play in recruiting, whether it’s playing time, jersey number, where you live, all the little things,” former Georgia offensive coordinator and current Colorado State head coach Mike Bobo said, per Vannini.
And in “all the little things,” Saban and Alabama are doing all right.
Still, Saban would like to see it even across the board.
"Every competitive league, whether it's the NFL or whatever, does everything they can to create parity," Saban said. "So now you take the basic No. 1 thing and made it unequal for some schools. Whether we were at the top or the bottom, I would feel the same way."
He shouldn’t worry about that in the short term, though. He’s doing just fine as it is.
Marc Torrence is the Alabama lead writer for Bleacher Report. All quotes and reporting were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.
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