John Talty and Armen Keteyian’s “The Price: What It Takes to Win in College Football’s Era of Chaos” hit bookshelves earlier this week, and it’s hard to imagine a more-timely look at the sport as the 2024 season kicks off.

Packed with dozens of first-hand accounts and interviews — both on-the-record and from anonymous sources — “The Price” checks in at a little less than 350 pages. It’s dense enough that even the most college football-educated readers will learn something in nearly every chapter, but not so unwieldy that one couldn’t race through it over the course of a few days.

It’s the second book for Talty, the former AL.com sports editor and SEC insider who now works as a national college football writer for CBS and 247 Sports. He also authored a well-received study of Nick Saban’s coaching methods and secrets, released in 2022.

His co-author is Keteyian, the veteran television investigative reporter and author of more than a dozen sports non-fiction books. His 2013 book “The System: Inside the Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football,” is something of a direct forebear to “The Price.”

“The genesis of the book originally was the Nick Saban-Jimbo Fisher war of words and trying to kind of understand what is happening within college football that would prompt these two big-name coaches to want to go at each other publicly in that fashion,” Talty told AL.com this week. “That’s kind of where it originally started.

“I was working on this book initially with somebody else actually, and just wasn’t able to get it to a point where it worked and trying to kind of figure out what the idea would end up being. Somebody connected me with Armen and got us on the phone … We had a conversation, it went well. I drew up a proposal and we both added some pieces to the puzzle. We were able to expand it out from there and tell a much broader story.”

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Saban, of course, is a major character in “The Price,” which details his days at LSU and Alabama, up to and including the 2023 season. There are juicy stories about Saban’s relationship with super-agent Jimmy Sexton and former assistant coaches such as Fisher, Mike Locksley and Lane Kiffin of course, but also the kind of minute, program-insider details that fans will salivate over.

Among them:

• Five-star quarterback recruit Julian Sayin turned down enormous offers of NIL money from other schools to sign with Alabama as part of the 2024 class because he had longed to play for Saban since he was a child. But once Saban left, Sayin felt he had no reason to stay in Tuscaloosa. He has since transferred to Ohio State.

• Saban believed at one point early in the 2023 season that true freshman Dylan Lonergan — and not 2022 back-up Jalen Milroe, redshirt freshman Ty Simpson or transfer Tyler Buchner — might be the Crimson Tide’s eventual answer at quarterback. The book also quotes Saban’s wife, Terry, lamenting on the eve of the Texas game as to what the transfer portal had done to Alabama’s roster and college football in general.

• Florida State’s Mike Norvell was a top candidate to replace Saban along with Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, who was hired less than three days after the Alabama coach stepped down. Those in the FSU athletic department were so concerned Norvell might leave for Tuscaloosa that they had already reached out to Kiffin as a backup plan. Speaking of Kiffin, according to Talty and Keteyian, he was never seriously considered as a replacement for Saban. Texas’ Steve Sarkisian was contacted, but quickly shot down the idea of leaving the Longhorns for the Crimson Tide.

“Saban’s retirement becomes part of the story, but just the fact that it’s the 12-team playoff starting this year and the conference realignment and all that, it all is kind of timely in that way as well,” Talty said. “We had to be willing to pivot and adapt pretty much at all times. “I can’t even count the amount of phone calls that Armen and I had ‘can you believe this just happened? What are we going to do with the book?’ At all these little moments along the way, we had to evolve and adjust.”

Saban isn’t the only focus of “The Price” of course. There are also multiple chapters on Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh as he navigated a 2023 national championship season marred by multiple suspensions and a sign-stealing scandal before ultimately leaving for the NFL.

Auburn gets its treatment as well, most notably the story of Tommy Tuberville’s rise from coach to U.S. Senator and an entertaining look at super-booster Jimmy Rane. The wealthiest man in Alabama and once the star of his own lumber commercials as the “Yella Fella” cowboy, Rane refers to his Auburn fandom as a “virus” he was first infected with as a pre-teen in the 1950s, but rejects the perception that he can have Tigers coaches hired and fired with the snap of his fingers.

Also included are a look at Jedd Fisch’s resurrection of the Arizona program and the current state of recruiting, NCAA enforcement, conference realignment, NIL collectives and the transfer portal. The stories of Sayin, Jaden Rashada, Fisher, Kirby Smart and attorney Tom Mars, among others, receive both thousand-foot views and deep inside character studies.

“I think in some ways, this book is incredibly timely, but also my hope is that, five years from now, a decade from now, we’re gonna look back at this period and kind of be like, ‘Wait, what was happening back then?’” Talty said. “I think especially once we get into the salary cap era, looking back, ‘Wait a second. We used to make just regular boosters pay all the workforce and not the school?

“I think that would seem wild to us and I’m hopeful that it will be a fun kind of snapshot of time of these key people, key players, key administrators and how they were trying to survive this world that seemed to be changing, at times, every day.”

“The Price” is available at Amazon.com or wherever books are sold. Readers can obtain a signed copy from Little Professor Book Shop in Homewood.