Nick Saban reveals biggest concern with college football

Alabama coach Nick Saban is all for competitive football games. As many of them as possible. However, he thinks a few recent developments across the sport could be changing the competitive balance for the worse. He recently sat down with Greg McElroy to appear on the Always College Football podcast, where he explained how realignment and NIL changes are further shifting the power towards the already powerful. Changes he believes will hurt the sport, not help.

Here were some of Saban’s comments on the show:

“We don’t have any guardrails on what we’re doing right now. We have no restrictions on who can do what. Some people are going to be capable of doing certain things. Other people are not going to be capable,” Saban said, likely referring to the explosion of NIL opportunities.

“But the bottom line is we’ll lose competitive balance. Which, everything we’ve always done in college football is to maintain competitive balance. Same scholarship, everybody had to play by the same rules, whether it was recruiting or whatever. Right now, that’s not how it is. If that’s the case, you’re going to create more haves and have-nots. Therefore, there’ll be less good games.”

He then went on to explain how attendance has decreased recently across the country and what he attributes that development to.

“One of my biggest concerns about college football is attendance has gradually fallen off. And I think one of the reasons for that is the quality of games. I mean we probably play three or four games every year our fans don’t really care about coming to see. Well, I don’t really want to play any games that our fans don’t want to come and see.”

Teams, at least in the SEC, play eight league games currently. Most also play an annual rival or another power conference school outside of the SEC. So that’s nine good games. But the other three games are generally against lower-conference or FCS opponents. In other words: not good, competitive games. Saban notes that teams likely schedule that way to ensure a bowl bid.

“Based on how the culture of college football is set up — largely because of eligibility for bowl games — nobody wants to play more games. They want to play games and make sure they can win six so they can go to a bowl game. That’s not necessarily the standard we live by here, but still, it’s hard to get people to play these games.”

Sure, qualifying for a bowl game is never a concern for Nick Saban at Alabama. But your Kentucky’s and Missouri’s and Vanderbilt’s of the world, historically speaking, need these easier games breaking up their SEC gauntlet just to make bowl games. Heck, LSU went 6-6 and barely made a bowl game last year. The SEC is loaded, and most teams want the extra non-conference matchups.