It’s silly season in college football.

It’s recruiting season.

That sentence requires some qualification. For the best college football coaching staffs, recruiting is basically a year-round proposition — most top-flight programs around the nation have the bulk of their recruiting classes committed to the roster long before National Signing Day ever dawns.

Still, all but the most ardent fans of the sport typically do their best to ignore recruiting as much as they can, since it feels a little unseemly following the every move, tweet and impulse of a 17-year-old.

That said, success like Alabama’s doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Recruiting national championships don’t really exist, but in the case of Nick Saban’s Alabama program, virtually every recruit who has signed on the dotted line now has a championship ring in his possession.

In fact, since the 2008 recruiting class — the one that featured Julio Jones, Mark Ingram and Dont’a Hightower, to name a few — left Tuscaloosa with a 48-6 overall record, each of Bama’s recruiting classes has amassed at least 46 victories in four seasons. The worst mark among them is the 2010 class, whose overall record was 46-7 (there were two national championships in the middle).

The highest win total in that period belongs to the 2012 class, which just departed with a record of 50-7, including three SEC championships and two national titles. That record is somewhat inflated by an expanded postseason — Alabama played 14 games in 2014, and 15 in the 2015 season.

The ’12 group at one point included Landon Collins, T.J. Yeldon and Amari Cooper, all early entrants to the 2015 NFL draft. It also included key members of the recent national championship: Reggie Ragland, Cyrus Jones, Geno Smith, Kenyan Drake and Adam Griffith.

For sheer win percentage, Bama’s class of 2009 is still its best. That group, which included Trent Richardson, Chance Warmack, A.J. McCarron, D.J. Fluker, Eddie Lacy, Anthony Steen and Ed Stinson, finished at Alabama with a 49-5 overall record, a winning percentage over .900. And that includes the national championship seasons of 2009, 2011 and 2012, as well as SEC titles in ’09 and ’12.

So the recruiting national championship thing was sort of a joke when Saban first came to Tuscaloosa. Now? Not so much.