One year ago Thursday night, The Fennec event center in Birmingham was the epicenter of an earthquake that was felt in every corner of college football.

Sitting cross-legged in a director’s chair at a fundraising event for the World Games, Alabama coach Nick Saban took a direct swipe at an SEC opponent as he answered a question about NIL and its nascent impact on the sport.

“[Texas] A&M bought every player on their team,” Saban said May 18, 2022. “Made a deal for name, image and likeness. We didn’t buy one player. Aight?”

Aight. The message was delivered as several local television cameras and reporters stood along the side of the banquet hall, and spread nationwide within hours. The fuse had been lit, and it detonated the next morning in College Station, Texas.

Jimbo Fisher’s 10-minute retaliatory news conference was a rare kind of theater for high-level college sports, with the Aggies coach lobbing volley after volley toward Saban and his history. “Maybe somebody should have slapped him,” Fisher opined at one point about Saban’s childhood.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey reprimanded both coaches and Saban apologized for “singling out” Texas A&M. By the time Fisher and Saban crossed paths two weeks later at the SEC’s meetings in Destin, the show was over. “I’m past all that,” Fisher said. “We’re moved on.”

On one hand, Saban’s blunt accusation and Fisher’s personal attacks toward Saban were a distraction from the greater issues at play with NIL. On the other hand, they brought attention toward the stewing tensions in college football since transfer rules were relaxed and NIL laws changed in 2021.

“I don’t know if this is a sustainable model,” Saban said last May during his broader commentary about NIL, which also included him naming Miami and Jackson State in addition to Texas A&M.

One year later, the situation has barely changed. The NCAA implemented transfer portal windows last fall to corral some of the rampant player movement in college football, and schools including Alabama have been allowed to more closely align with third-party entities that once were conducting NIL deals at an arm’s length from the athletic department.

But otherwise the NIL “guardrails” desired by Saban and others have not been set up. The second full offseason of college football’s wild west is nearly completed, and the 2023 season is on the horizon with the sport’s new model taking root — no matter how eager or reluctant coaches might be about it.

And although it might have been lost amid the crossfire last May, Saban and Fisher’s stances about NIL were almost identical.

Said Saban that night in Birmingham: “If the NCAA doesn’t get some protection from litigation — whether we’ve got to get an antitrust or whatever it is — from the federal government standpoint, this is not going to change because they cannot enforce their rules. But the NCAA can’t enforce their rules because it’s not against the law, and that’s an issue. That’s a problem. Unless we get something that protects them from litigation, I don’t know what we’re going to do about it.”

And said Fisher the next day: “I would like to find unified rules across this country to put things in place. That’s what I want. And I don’t know what those are. I’m not smart enough to figure it out. I don’t know what the anti-trust laws, all those bylaws … the government needs to step in.”

A year later, the government has not yet stepped in. Midterm elections took precedent last year, even as Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin worked to draft a bill to provide national NIL regulation as opposed to the current patchwork of state laws. The draft of that Senate bill is now complete, Sports Illustrated reported earlier this month, and a different bill is also being developed in the House of Representatives.

The goal of federal legislation would be to provide more uniform NIL laws for college athletes but also allow the NCAA to enforce its own NIL rules without running afoul of legal precedents set by the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 2021. The NCAA hired former Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker as its president earlier this year, providing the organization with a political veteran to strike deals on Capitol Hill.

Until that happens, much of Saban’s wish list about NIL remains unfulfilled a year after the now-71 year old coach raised concerns about the current state of college football.

Saban made three points about NIL at last June’s SEC meetings. First, he expressed a desire to have a uniform NIL policy that, “supports some kind of equitable, national competition.” Second, he wanted “some kind of transparency” in players’ deals to verify work was being performed in exchange for payments, which remains part of NCAA NIL policy. Third, he called for oversight over “unfair” representation by NIL agents who in some cases can financially exploit players.

None of those items have been checked off. There are still obstacles to federal legislation, there is no central database of NIL deals, and there is no governing body to vet NIL agents or other people involved in striking deals between players and schools.

Instead, the latest high school and transfer portal recruiting cycles have brought NIL increasingly to the forefront. Saban told a group of Alabama high school coaches in January that one 2023 high school recruit wanted $800,000 to play for the Tide, and an outgoing transfer wanted $500,000 and law school acceptance for his girlfriend to stay.

Professional sports leagues generally operate under salary caps, universal rules, have widely-available salary data for players and unions to regulate agents’ activities with players. In his latest extensive comments about NIL during a Stephen A. Smith podcast in March, a seemingly exasperated Saban took a different approach to the issue: if the avalanche of changes to college sports cannot be rolled back, borrow a page from those pro leagues.

“I would much rather see us adopt the NFL model than be where we are right now,” Saban told Smith. “Pay the players, and they can become employees, which a lot of people in college — that’s not what college football or amateur sports are supposed to be — but I would rather see that than be where we are now, where nobody has a contract, you can leave whenever you’re want, and we can actually create an institution [Yea Alabama] that can pay you to play for our school.

“I asked the question then and I’ll ask you now: is that what we want college football to become?”

At this point, it might be what college football has become.

Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.