Nick Saban addresses Michigan sign-stealing scandal, how scouting has evolved over time

In light of the Michigan sign-stealing scandal, Alabama coach Nick Saban is calling for a differentiated rule set that would allow some common-sense measures to be put in place for teams competing on roughly the same plane.

If Power Five programs can afford to use specialized equipment to improve communications — think helmet headsets — and reduce the impact of sign-stealing, they should be able to, Saban said.

“For those who play in leagues like we do who have the funds to do it in the SEC or the Big Ten or Big 12, whatever it is, we should be able to do it,” Saban said on Thursday on the Pat McAfee Show. “The Power Five conferences should be able to do it. If other schools can’t afford to do it… there’s such a discrepancy we shouldn’t be living by the same rules.”

Saban had an interesting metaphor for a set of rules that might apply differently to Power Five schools versus Group of Five schools, for example.

“Taxes, you know? I mean some people that make a lot of money pay a lot more taxes than people that don’t make a lot of money,” Saban said. “Well we should have the same kind of rule differentiation in college athletics, which we’ve always tried to govern it all the same, but it’s not the same.”

Saban went through a long history of how sign-stealing and in-person scouting of games evolved in the NFL, eventually bringing about the helmet communications that are still used today.

He’s familiar with the pitfalls of allowing things to run amuck, but he also sees no reason the communications can’t be modernized.

“There’s no reason that you can’t just tell the quarterback what the play is rather than having signs and signals and three people signaling and all this stuff to try to get the play, which is more difficult for the players, incidentally, because they all got to get the sign because everybody’s going no-huddle,” Saban said. “And for the defensive players who are going against the fastball team, all 11 guys got to know the signals, all 11 guys got to know the signs because they’re going fast and you can’t communicate it, rather than just being able to tell somebody, ‘This is the call.’ So that would clean up all this.”

Chalk up the Alabama coach as in favor of modernizing the college football communication rules. He’s one of a majority of SEC coaches who voiced such an opinion this week.

Saban intimated it’s just a logical conclusion to reach if you follow the history of the NFL.

“If you look historically you would know that there’s reasons they changed the rules so you couldn’t do that,” Nick Saban said of in-person scouting for signals. “Then they come up with the microphone helmet or whatever you call it and there was no sign-stealing, there were no signs because it was just communication, which I think we would solve a lot of those problems if we would do the same thing in college football. There’s no reason not to do that.”