Years ago we wrote about the mythos surrounding college football’s Nick Saban, and it turns out we were correct. Without under-the-table advantages that funded the best players his way, Saban would just be an average coach—like he was at Michigan State and in the NFL with the Miami Dolphins. Well, with the NIL garbage in full swing, it looks like Lil’ Nicky Satan is not so great anymore. Who could have thunk it?!

Anyone with an ounce of critical-thinking skills, of course. When a coach is not a consistent winner from stop to stop, there is something amiss. All one has to do is analyze the circumstances and the results, and usually, the answer is right in front of us. The problem is that, emotionally, most people aren’t capable of processing those answers—because there is a conflict between what we’ve been told and what actually is.

Welcome to Life 101: It’s called willful ignorance in a reality-distortion zone created of an individual’s own cognitive dissonance … a refusal to accept ethics, facts, law, logic, morality, reason, and science in thought processes on what constitutes the real world around us. And there’s also a little bit of psychology here, as if you hear something enough, you tend to believe it must be true. Thanks, ESPN, for your fake journalism!

Most sports fans actually are too absorbed by pathos to accept ethos and logos, basically: the way Boston Red Sox, Houston Astros, and San Francisco Giants fans just retort with “Haters gonna hate!” drivel when you present them with the facts about how those teams cheated to win the World Series after not winning anything for decade upon decade while doing things the honest way. But we digress … back to Saban.

We discussed this before when we commented on Urban Meyer and his coaching record, too: someone can’t be mediocre for half their career and then thrive under specific circumstances enough to be lauded. It’s also why Joe Montana is a better quarterback than Tom Brady ever could dream of being: after all, what did Brady do in college? Split time with an underclassman? Not even win a conference title? Exactly.

Perhaps this will be the one good thing to come out of the NIL mess that the college football landscape has become: the humbling of Saban before the gods. This is long overdue and well deserved, too, as he played the part so well for years, pretending he was all that and more—when many of us knew better, explained why to prove it, and watched while still-clueless people emotionally masturbated all about Saban’s aura.