3/12/2024 football Edit

Saban is the greatest of all time, but he missed the mark on Capitol Hill

Adam Gorney • Rivals.com

National Recruiting Director

When the lightbulb was invented, candlemakers said the world was changing. When Henry Ford rolled out his first car, horse-and-buggy makers complained.

Same with the cell phone, the personal computer and so much else in our lives. And now a new age has come to college football and coaches set in their ways, happy to make millions upon millions of dollars while preaching about tenuous terms like “personal development” and “support” and “being prepared for life” cannot wrap their minds around the changing landscape.

Or they just don’t want to.

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Former Alabama coach Nick Saban sat for a roundtable with other leaders in college athletics and some members of Congress Tuesday and talked about the NIL era in college football, collectives, a so-called pay-for-play model and more.

I believe Saban is genuine in his concerns about the sport (and there are definitely issues that need to be hammered out and solved) but he’s just missing the larger point of the entire issue.

Maybe it’s because Saban is already a millionaire many times over. Maybe it’s because he has multiple homes and beautiful cars and every perk he could possibly desire.

He loved having all the control running his program the way he wanted it done and now because that set-up has changed, retirement seemed more appealing. Good for him.

But don’t hold it against others trying to chase success in how they want to define it, either, or where they seek it.

Saban started his head coaching career at Toledo. If this was all about personal development and preparing people for life after football, why didn’t he stay there? Toledo is a tough, blue-collar town, lots of kids need help.

But he then moved on to Michigan State and then LSU and then the Miami Dolphins and then Alabama. That’s a whole lot of moving for one coach who derided players who transfer, some multiple times, in the pursuit of what they think is best for their future. He did it I guess, but they can’t.

“I don’t think that’s the spirit of college athletics and I don’t think that’s the spirit of what we want college athletics to be,” Saban said.

Is the spirit of college athletics 30-plus head coaches bouncing around this offseason? New Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer was hardly off the plane from the national championship game at Washington before he accepted the Alabama job following Saban’s retirement.

Former UCLA coach Chip Kelly was shopping himself to any team that would take him - college or NFL. He ended up as Ohio State’s offensive coordinator. Coaches leverage their success to float their names at other schools in desperate attempts for ADs to bump their pay every year. Hundreds, if not more, assistant coaches moved around this offseason. Coaches can bounce around at will, no problem, but when players do it, call Congress!

Is that the so-called spirit of college athletics that probably never existed or hasn’t in a very long time?

Saban is a football genius. He’s the best college football coach of all time. He’s a winner. He’s smart. He’s great at what he did for decades. There is no question about that. But come on.

“My wife even said to me, we have all the recruits over on Sunday with their parents for breakfast and she would always meet with the mothers and talk about how she was going to help impact their sons and how they would be well taken care of and she came to me right before I retired and said to me, ‘Why are we doing this?’” Saban said.

“And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘All they care about is how much you’re going to pay them. They don’t care about how you’re going to develop them which is what we’ve always done so why are we doing this?’ That was really a red alert that we really are creating a circumstance that is not beneficial to the development of young people which is why I always did what I did.”

Fair enough. But Saban saw a situation he didn’t like, and left by retiring.

The players in the transfer portal are doing the same thing. The players in recruiting who are in part basing their college decisions off NIL packages are doing the same thing.

Two things can be true at the same time: Personal development and massive financial gain don’t have to be mutually exclusive. To knock players (or get out of the sport entirely) because they’re doing exactly what you did in the coaching ranks is the height of hypocrisy.

Should NFL players be chastised when they leave for bigger and better deals with another team? Should movie stars and musicians not get paid gobs of money until they’re out of college because “personal development” is being hindered?

Saban is right. The spirit of college football, of the student-athlete, was that the football coach had a nice house in town and said hello to everyone while walking to work on tree-lined streets and he was a member of the community. That’s no longer the case: These coaches are treated like kings.

That old model went out once the billion-dollar television contracts and the jet skis at the lake house and the insurance commercials came in style. In one sense, Saban wants everything the way it used to be, only please keep him at his $11 million salary, and he’ll tell everybody what’s best for them.

The game is changing, yes, in some good ways and in some concerning ways that need to be dealt with. But like anything in life, change is the only constant and if you’re not going to adapt, you’re going to die. Or at least retire.

In every aspect of life, change happens. You don’t like your high school, you go to a new one that has a better English department. You don’t like your job, you find a new one. Another employer offers you more money, you leave. Taxes are too high in California, you move to Texas or Florida. College students who aren’t athletes transfer all the time. Yet, college football players bouncing around is the problem?

Might it just be that the overlord coaches who have greatly benefited from the system they helped create and enriched themselves hundreds of times over don’t want to see that apple cart upset by these pesky players doing exactly what they do all the time, too?