Nick Saban opens up on the current problems in college athletics

Alabama head football coach Nick Saban has caught a lot of heat over the past week after his controversial comments, calling out Texas A&M, Jimbo Fisher, Deion Sanders, and others. The base of Saban’s argument was the problem that are currently hurting college athletics.

On Saturday, Saban joined the ESPN+ broadcast with Joe Buck for the PGA Championship, and he elaborated on those problems within college athletics. NIL and the transfer portal have completely transformed the sport as we once knew it, and Saban is calling for more parity and competitive balance in the sport of college football.

“Well I think the problem with all of that is that there isn’t parity, and it’s not going to create competitive balance,” Saban said. “The spirit of competition and the interest that you have is that the more parity there is, the more balance there is, the more interest there is because there’s a lot of close games and they come down to the wire. I think that’s what people enjoy and that’s what people want to see. So some kind of way – and I don’t have the solution to the problem – we have to create that some kind of way in college athletics.”

Saban is calling for guardrails in college athletics

Earlier in the week, Saban called out Jimbo Fisher by saying that Texas A&M bought every player in their 2022 recruiting class. That led to a fiery response from Fisher, and people across the industry have had strong reactions to Saban’s commentary ever since.

NIL has changed the game in college athletics, and Saban knows that. The challenging thing for him has been that there aren’t any “guardrails,” which is a needed entity with the current landscape.

“I don’t want to go down that road of bidding for players out of high school. I don’t,” Saban said. “But if we go through this recruiting class this year and we lose all the players, because they’re making a hundred thousand dollars going someplace else, then what can you do?

“The hard thing is there are no guardrails on this road. You can do whatever the hell you want, and in the end, most of this is not good for the players. You know, there are some terrible statistics out there about guys that transfer and how many of those guys graduate, terrible statistics on that. And we’re enticing a lot of that.”