Nick Saban addresses the importance, difficulty of parity in college football

Nick Saban stressed the importance of parity in college football but also acknowledged how difficult it could be to achieve.

The Alabama head coach sat down with Fox Sports’ Joel Klatt to discuss this hot topic. Saban used the NFL example and how professional leagues are practically designed for parity.

However, it’s a little different for college football.

“Well, I think all leagues want to create parity,” Saban said. “If you look at the NFL, they would love for everybody to be 8-8 going into the 17th game of the season. Because every fan base in every city would be excited about the outcome of the next game. So parity creates a lot of excitement. I think it’s harder to do in college football because we have so many different teams and the fundamentals are different at the University of Alabama, as opposed to another school and I don’t want to mention another school, but a 1AA school, a Division II school, even a lower half Division I school. 

“The money’s different, the dynamics are different. The investment that’s made and the athletes and the program are different and the value created for the athletes is different. So it’s not all the same.”

In Saban’s parity scenario in college football, there’d have to be a major realignment in college football. While the SEC and Big Ten already did so, with 2024 scheduled to be the first year of major changes, there might have to be more.

“So if we want to create parity, we would have to take okay, this is a group of 16 teams or however many, I don’t know what the number is, and these are the four or five leagues that we’re going to have and we may consolidate them,” Saban said. “And we’re going to try to create parity in a more refined group. I don’t think that’s the only way, that’s probably the only way that you could accomplish that. 

“But in the NFL, you know, if you lose, you draft early, if you win, you draft late. You play a harder schedule when you win, you play an easier schedule if you lose. So, you know, all those things, our moves are for parity, so that there’s interest.”

From his own perspective, Saban might not care about parity in terms of his own success. He’d rather just win every single game and keep Alabama No. 1 overall, no exceptions.

“Our fan base, they want to dominate,” Saban said. “So my job is to try to create a program here where we have the best chance to succeed and have success relative to the competition. But I think even in the SEC, when you add Texas and Oklahoma, there’s going to be more parity because there’s probably going to be six seven teams ranked in the top 20 each year that are going to be playing each other.”