Nick Saban advocates for college basketball-like rule change to promote harder scheduling

While this should come as no surprise, the goal of every college football program is to win as many games as possible. For Nick Saban and Alabama, that’s an undefeated regular season and possibly even a national championship. Others would be happy with somewhere around six wins and making a bowl game, even if it means playing an easier schedule.

For Saban, he recently tried to look at it from the perspective of the fans. He said playing quality opponents should be the top priority but since there is no reward besides potential a win, programs are afraid to do so.

He even suggested making some kind of system the same way college basketball does. Depending on where teams rank, wins and losses may not affect bowl eligibility, still letting teams play in football’s postseason.

“If attendance goes down, how does that affect us in a positive way? “To play quality games is the most important thing,” Saban said. “But our rules don’t enhance us playing quality games because you got to have a winning record to make a bowl game. Why don’t we do it like basketball? Have some rating system where even if you went 5-7 but you played a pretty good schedule and beat some good teams, you could go to a bowl game.

“Rather than creating a schedule where you play four teams you know you’re going to beat and if I can just win two other games, I’ll be bowl eligible and that’s important to my program. And it’s important to me keeping my job. But how about the fans? Do they want to go see these games?

Saban even got more specific, talking about only SEC scheduling. There is an option on the table where Alabama and company could be playing nine conference games a season. Well, Saban may even be in favor of bumping the number up to 10 as we saw during the 2020 season.

“Why don’t we play nine games in the SEC? Now when they talked about playing nine in the future, I’m saying ‘why don’t we play 10.'”

The quadrant system is one the Selection Committee looks at when picking the NCAA Tournament games in basketball. Depending on where teams were ranked and at what venue would decide how a win or loss was viewed.

Saban could be asking for a similar system to make scheduling inside the game better.