Legendary college football coach Nick Saban says that the things he used to believe in “no longer exist” in the current NIL-friendly world of college football.
The recently retired Saban participated in a Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) roundtable hosted by Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R) on Capitol Hill Tuesday. The former Alabama coach said that the emergence of NIL has created a recruiting process in college football that cares only about money and nothing about the development of young men.
“All the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics,” Saban said. “It was always about developing players. It was always about helping people be more successful in life.”
“All the things I believed in for all these years. 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics.”
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Nick Saban knows NIL changed everything. pic.twitter.com/IEW4QCYNnu
Saban illustrated his point by bringing up a discussion he had with his wife, Terry.
“My wife even said to me, we have all the recruits over on Sunday with their parents for breakfast,” Saban said. “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. She came to me like right before I retired and said, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ 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?’ To me, that was sort of a red alert that we really are creating a circumstance here that is not beneficial to the development of young people.”
Head coach Nick Saban of the Alabama Crimson Tide leads the team onto the field prior to facing the Texas A&M Aggies at Bryant-Denny Stadium on October 08, 2022, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Saban stressed that he isn’t opposed to NIL in principle but that the development of young people had been his primary focus and reason for choosing to stay in college instead of returning to the NFL.
“I want their quality of life to be good,” Saban said. “Name, image and likeness is a great opportunity for them to create a brand for themselves. I’m not against that at all. To come up with some kind of a system that can still help the development of young people, I still think, is paramount to the future of college athletics.”
Saban enjoyed unparalleled success in his college coaching career. During stints at LSU and Alabama, he won seven national championships.
