Now that Nick Saban is retired from coaching, he can offer a more unfiltered take on what he thinks of the state of college football. Not surprisingly, he is not particularly pleased with it.
The former Alabama coach said he is eager to help bring change to college football. Saban is displeased at the chaos surrounding the sport, and thinks that it no longer resembles what it once was.
“If my voice can bring about some meaningful change, I want to help any way I can, because I love the players, and I love college football,” Saban told Chris Low of ESPN. “What we have now is not college football — not college football as we know it. You hear somebody use the word ‘student-athlete.’ That doesn’t exist.”
Saban cited a whole array of issues he has with the state of the sport. He was critical of donor-funded NIL collectives and the major roster turnover that exists at the moment, suggesting that player compensation needs to be brought in-house and that it should work as some sort of mutual agreement with players.
“I’m not really looking for a job, but I do know I’d like to impact college football the best way I can, whether it’s being a spokesperson or anything else,” Saban said. “Listen, I’m for the players. It’s not that I’m not for the players. I want to see the players have a great quality of life and be able to create value for themselves. But we’ve gone to nobody talking about education, nobody talking about creating value for their future, to talking only about how much money can I make while I’m in college.”
Many believed that Saban’s retirement as Alabama coach was driven in part by the recent changes to the sport. The coach himself denied that this was the case, but some still don’t believe him.
Saban is hardly the first to identify many of the problems that college football is dealing with. Coming up with solutions is a much bigger challenge. We will likely be hearing from him a lot in his new role, so he will have a large platform to share any ideas he might have to make things run more smoothly.