AMAC EXCLUSIVE
Legendary college football coach Nick Saban, who won seven national titles over 28 years as a head coach, testified before Congress on March 12 and has re-ignited the debate on paying college athletes.
Saban’s retirement from the University of Alabama earlier this year surprised many in the college football world, particularly considering the Crimson Tide’s status as one of the premier programs in the sport. But it soon became clear that Saban had no intention of stepping away from college athletics entirely. Instead, he seems to be moving into more of an “elder statesman” role, where he intends to use the universal respect he enjoys from not just college football fans but the country at large to advocate for reforms to compensation rules.
That mission brought him to the U.S. Capitol last week, where he participated in a roundtable with senators on not just college football, but collegiate athletics in general.
“All these things that I believed in, for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics. It was always about developing players, it was always about helping people be more successful in life,” Saban told lawmakers. “All they care about is how much you’re going to pay them. They don’t care about how you’re going to develop them, which is what we’ve always done, so why are we doing this?”
Starting in 2021, following a tumultuous period of individual state action and even a Supreme Court case, the NCAA began allowing college athletes to receive compensation for their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL). In theory, the change was supposed to allow players to capitalize on their fame to earn money while still in college – something which had before been explicitly banned.
In practice, however, the program has turned college sports – and in particular the multi-billion-dollar college football industry – upside down.
At the biggest schools, groups of boosters have formed “NIL collectives,” where donors pool their money to target highly rated players. The collectives then offer those players large sums in exchange for a miniscule amount of promotional or volunteer work – in effect creating an indirect payment scheme. At the University of Texas, for instance, offensive line recruits are promised at least $50,000 per year in exchange for a few hours of charity work.
Changes to transfer rules have also encouraged teams to poach players from other squads by promising them more money. While NIL proponents initially insisted that the changes would increase parity and benefit smaller schools, in reality the wealthier blue-blood programs like Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, Texas, and USC have been able to drain lesser programs of their most talented players and further cement their status as college football royalty.
The sums of money now flowing to top players are enormous. USC quarterback Caleb Williams, who won the Heisman Trophy in 2022 and is widely expected to be the top pick in this year’s NFL draft, reportedly made more than $10 million on NIL while in college. Ohio State allegedly has to spend around that sum every year just to keep its current players on the roster.
As a growing number of coaches, including Saban, are warning, the NIL-era is ruining college football. “I’m for student-athletes being able to share in some of this revenue,” Saban said, but the current situation is “a red alert that we really are creating a circumstance that is not beneficial to the development of young people, which is why I always did what I did.”
Georgia Head Coach Kirby Smart, Saban’s former defensive coordinator at Alabama, has likewise expressed his concerns about NIL causing players to be too focused on money. “I think it’s much more important how you develop players than how much NIL you can give them,” he said during Georgia’s pro day earlier this month.
While some voices in sports media have suggested that Saban and Smart are hypocritical for earning millions of dollars per year while opposing the current NIL structure, that criticism misses the nuance of their argument. Neither coach is opposed to offering players compensation. They simply want more guardrails to ensure that the payment structure is in the best interests of both players and coaches.
As Josh Pate, the host of the popular year-round college football show The Late Kick with Josh Pate has pointed out, the current situation in college football would be like if the NFL did away with the salary cap and contracts and allowed every player to become an unrestricted free agent at the end of every season. Chaos would quickly ensue and the overall product on the field would suffer, which is exactly what is happening in college football.
Saban also made clear on Capitol Hill last week that fixing what’s broken in college football is crucial for the survival of college athletics as a whole. College football, and to a significantly lesser extent, college basketball, are the only sports that make any money, and they pay for the 22 other NCAA sports – including the life-changing scholarship opportunities that those sports make available to high school students.
But despite the fact that a number of lawmakers have promised to introduce legislation regulating NIL, Saban’s hope that Congress can solve the problem is likely misplaced. Congress has proven itself hopelessly inept at virtually everything it has been asked to do, from securing the border to passing a budget that doesn’t set the country on a course to fiscal disaster. If anything, the American people should want Congress to stay as far away from the issue as possible, lest they ruin college sports completely.
A big part of the problem is the NCAA itself, an organization that has become astoundingly corrupt and incompetent. The NCAA is charged with working alongside coaches and players to develop a working framework for things like NIL. It failed miserably, and has continued to fumble opportunities to rein-in the wild pay-for-play schemes that now dominate the sport.
At the very least, however, Saban is elevating this issue and pushing for real solutions, rather than just rhetoric and complaints. For those of us who love Saturdays in the fall and all the traditions and pageantry of college football, this is something to be grateful for.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @ShaneHarris513.
