Maybe I’m naive.

College football is a multi-billion dollar business at this point. The top programs are generating close to $200 million per year. SEC schools spend more than $1 million per year on recruiting with regularity.

No matter how many times a Missouri or Mississippi State emerges near the top of the national rankings mostly with three-star players, I also understand that securing prep talent remains very, very important.

But do we really condone our head coaches trying to run guys like Steve Spurrier and Nick Saban out of the business for being “too old?”

Negative recruiting seems to become a more entrenched tactic each year. (ESPN did an extensive job detailing how that practice gets used in reality.) And it makes sense on some level. You’re selling these kids on going to Georgia instead of Auburn, or Florida instead of Florida State. Fostering a little rivalry hate isn’t a bad thing.

But negative recruiting against a coaches’ age?

“I’m not looking to get out. I’m really not, even though I know that’s going to start being talked about more now,” Saban, told ESPN.com recently. “What I have noticed is that it’s the first time people are starting to say to recruits, ‘He won’t be there the whole time you’re there,’ because of my age.

“Does that really impact your ability to stay good? I don’t know. But if it did, it would make you say, ‘Well, what’s up with this?’ My philosophy is that I’m going to be here for as long as I feel like I can be effective, impact the players, help them be more successful in life and continue to have a successful program.”

The average football coaching tenure in the SEC is about four years. One could argue that Saban is among the most likely to be coaching at Alabama four years from now, given the way that job security works in this conference for those not winning national titles.

Can any coach really promise a 2017 recruit that he’ll be at the university for the kid’s entire career? For some players, that would mean coaching through the 2021 season.

Spurrier, often one of the most forthright coaches in the conference in terms of the media, made the mistake of admitting after the 2014 season that he’d pondered retirement. Opposing coaches pounced. South Carolina’s already-average recruiting class got hammered. I believe all the subsequent negativity impacted Spurrier’s decision to resign in the middle of the ’15 season.

There have been reports that opposing coaches have used the same tactic against Kansas State’s Bill Snyder, who will turn 77 years old during the ’16 football season.

Bobby Bowden was 80 years old when Florida State (understandably) pushed him into retirement. I’m not here to suggest Saban is going to coach for 16 more years. But he’s also given no indication on a timeline for retirement. If anything, Saban continues to insist that he’s not close to finished. To suggest that he will for sure leave prior to 2019 or ’20 is speculative at best.

And do you really need five years with a coach like Saban? A lot of the top-tier recruits are headed to the NFL after three years anyway.

I’m all for explaining why a team’s offensive system is better than other competitors. Or a school telling a recruit that their own coach is tremendous. But do we really want to be constantly making it impossible for anyone older than 65 to continue to hold down an SEC coaching job?

We’ve already failed to stem the tide of horrific Twitter rants channeled at these 17- and 18-year-old kids by misplaced adult “fans.” The No. 1 recruit in 2017, Rashan Gary, got a voicemail from someone purporting to be a Clemson fan and making a KKK reference. When a touted recruit is committed to one school and still takes visits to others, he gets skewered.

Do we want head coaches and assistants adding to the rotten pile of garbage that is football recruiting?

There are some that would love to see Saban ushered into retirement, making it that much easier to win an SEC title — or maintain one’s job by winning 9 or 10 games a season. But Spurrier was a year removed from lighting up the league when this nonsense started to cripple him as a recruiter. Essentially this sort of negative recruiting will only act as an accelerant for coaches already losing their fastball.

What’s the rush to get them out of a job? I’m sure Georgia and Tennessee would love to extract some revenge on Spurrier in ’16, but instead those programs have to face Will Muschamp — who is at least going to be a bear to compete against on the recruiting trail.

RELATED: A year-by-year history of Nick Saban’s love affair with the media

Many times those older coaches are the ones who are the most interesting. You don’t reach 70 years old as an SEC head coach unless you’ve been very successful. And at that point coaches are much more likely to be honest and show personality in the media, even if that personality involves grumpy, Eeyore-like rants.

Les Miles, Bret Bielema and Dan Mullen are always good for a chuckle or two. But Bielema is 46 years old. Can you imagine him 20 years from now, when he just doesn’t care what you think and he’s willing to say whatever comes to his mind?

Look at it another way. I can’t imagine Saban ever imploring a recruit to avoid another SEC school due to that coaches’ age. It seems like programs who resort to these types of tactics are unprofessional. Desperate, even.

While there are a ton of positives to the $31.1 million payout that each SEC school received from the conference this year — including the ability for a program like Ole Miss to sustain long-term success — there are downsides as well. “Ethics” and “cut-throat business” never have been good bed partners. And that’s what college football has become, for better or worse.

Call me old-fashioned. I just don’t like seeing all this negativity trickle down to 17-year-old prospects and up to 70-year-old coaches.