The college football world has been on fire over the last 24 hours over the public war of words between Alabama head coach Nick Saban and Texas A&M head coach Jimbo Fisher. Needless to say, the SEC office is not happy about this at all.
The conference issued public reprimands for both head coaches on Thursday afternoon with a statement from SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey:
The SEC has issued public reprimands for both Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher.
— Yahoo Sports College Football (@YahooSportsCFB) May 19, 2022
Statement from Greg Sankey ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/weyODossdG
This all began on Wednesday night when Saban alleged in an interview that Texas A&M “bought” every player in their No. 1 recruiting class. Wasting no time to respond, Fisher called for a press conference this morning where he took a page out of pro wrestling and went full scorched earth on the Crimson Tide head coach. He called Saban and narcissist and challenged everyone to dig into his past.
This is easily the most high profile and incendiary public beef we’ve seen between two head coaches of power programs that we’ve seen in quite some time and something that the SEC offices does not like to see. As people have pointed out on Thursday, the SEC rose to prominence in the 2000’s in part because of the ability of former commissioner Mike Slive to get all warring factions within the conference in line and keep their dirty laundry out of the public eye.
Saban has since apologized for his remarks about the Aggie head coach. We’ll see if we’ll get any more drama from these two SEC West rivals as the offseason rolls on.