“Just like Nick Saban has recruited five-star athletes, the university is going after the best and brightest students,” said Calvin Brown, Alabama’s director of alumni affairs. “We understand that there are young people out there who first view us, or any other institution, through the window of athletics.”

As it grows, skeptics, many outside the university, question how much of the financial juggernaut makes its way to the classroom, and scoff at what they see as an imbalance of spending on facilities for athletes instead of regular students.

Dr. Allen Sack, professor emeritus at the University of New Haven and a member of the Drake Group, which pushes for educational improvements in college athletics, says that while big football universities claim that money is flowing to the classroom, it is often difficult to verify, though the wealth usually means there is some benefit.

“They are competing at the top level for tens of millions of network and marketing dollars,” Sack said. “Where is that money going? How much of it is going into laboratories and academics? Is it enhancing the reputation of the university? Nobody really knows those answers.”

Alabama has funneled some of its largess into millions of dollars in scholarships and faculty salaries, with pledges to do more as it essentially monetizes the passion for the sport and embeds it in the university’s DNA.

A Business-Minded Athletic Department

In one of the earliest known examples of the power of product placement, each episode of “The Bear Bryant Show” on Sundays began with Bryant twisting off the cap of a Coke bottle and opening a bag of Golden Flake chips, a nod to the sponsors bringing his thoughts on the previous day’s game into living rooms across Alabama.

No one embodies this dynamic as neatly as Bill Battle, Alabama’s athletic director since 2013. He played on Bryant’s 1961 national championship team and then lined up across the field from the Bear as the coach of the University of Tennessee. In 1970, when Battle took that job, he was 28 and the youngest head coach in the nation.