Nick Saban reacts to Matt Sluka redshirt decision, cautions against 'consequences' of NIL agents

Matthew Sluka, the now-former UNLV quarterback, shocked college football when he decided this week to quit playing for the undefeated Runnin’ Rebels and would redshirt and prepare to transfer. The move, Sluka and his family came to explain, stemmed from a seeming $100,000 in promised NIL that didn’t materialize.

And amid the still-developing fallout of the situation, Nick Saban isn’t sure that what Sluka did is actually in his best interests, long-term. He understands the appeal of chasing a short-term payout — and acknowledged he wasn’t familiar with intimate details of the situation — but feels like absent a guarantee of an equal or better opportunity elsewhere, to opt-out midseason is an incredible risk.

“But the way we are right now where everybody’s a consistent free agent, you don’t have any contract, you don’t have any responsibility or obligation to your team, I don’t know the player at UNLV that’s opting out, what kind of value is he really creating for his future, based on what he’s doing,” Saban said on the “Pat McAfee Show” on Friday. “I don’t know that he really is. And how does it affect his teammates? And what’s everybody else’s in the countries teams going to think of what he’s doing? There’s so many consequences and people don’t really ever think about the 40% of the guys who get in the portal who lose their scholarship because they got in the portal and don’t get an opportunity to go someplace else because they thought the grass was going to be greener on top of the septic tank and it’s not.”

After some laughter from the hosts of the show at Saban’s septic tank one-liner, the former coach continued with his point.

“Anyway, there’s a lot of consequences out there of this kind of behavior and the culture that we’ve created in college athletics,” Saban said. “We’re really not creating value for peoples future, we’re trying to see how much money we can make right now while we’re going to college and that’s a huge shift in the dynamic of development of college players.”

McAfee also pointed to more recent reports, including one that revealed some local sportsbook and casino executives offered UNLV the $100,000 that Sluka felt he was promised, an offer that was rebuffed for a number of reasons, per reports.

And that sort of machination is something Saban would like to see removed from college football. He’s also concerned that this could be a case where a player is getting bad guidance from an agent or others.

“And I think the players need protection,” Saban said. “You have the NFLPA that you can’t even be an agent unless you can pass certain muster to create value for players. Well, none of the players in college have any protection from anyone. Anybody can be an agent, anybody can be that third party on the street telling a guy what to do, so you don’t even know if he’s getting good information, bad information. So there’s a lot of things that we could fix in college football and I don’t think it’s that far away. Because it’s such a great game and there’s so much interest and passion and enthusiasm that it’s worth it. It’s worth it to get it fixed.”

Through the whole discussion, Saban also did make another point clear: He’s not against players getting money. He just is opposed to the slapdash, varied system that has come to rule college sports at present.

“I don’t really want anybody to think I don’t want players to make money,” Saban said. “But name, image and likeness has kind of turned into pay for play. So if we’re going to do that, why don’t we just revenue share with the players and they can still have name, image and likeness? But it’s gotta be something that creates marketing value for some company or whatever and they get paid for it, like it’s Bryce Young doing a Dr. Pepper commercial.”