Former football coach Nick Saban laments the current landscape of college sports

Invited to speak at a roundtable discussion with a handful of US Senators on Capitol Hill Tuesday, former football coach Nick Saban spoke about how the current landscape of college athletics contributed to his decision to retire from the University of Alabama after the 2023 season.

“All the things that I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics,” Saban said at the roundtable, a video of which was posted online by Sen. Ted Cruz (TX). “It was always about developing players. It was always about helping people be more successful in life.”

“That’s the reason that I always like college athletics more than the NFL is because you had the opportunity to develop young people,” Saban continued.

“I want their quality of life to be good. I think as I said before, Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) is a great opportunity for them to create a brand for themselves. I’m not against that at all. But to come up with some kind of a system that still can help the development of young people, I think is paramount to the future of college athletics.”

The 72-year-old Saban said the current system also has no framework in place to preserve competitive balance, leaving whichever universities are willing to “pay the most money, raise the most money, buy the most players” in a position to spend their way to an advantage on the field of play.

Saban, who won seven national championships as head coach at Alabama and LSU, went on to say he favors some form of revenue sharing with student athletes over the current system, which he called “pay for play” and likened to professional free agency.

“I’m for student athletes being able to share in some of this revenue. And I think the number one solution to all this is if we could have some kind of a revenue sharing proposition…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/former-football-coach-nick-saban-094610330.html

Author : CNN

Publish date : 2024-03-13 09:46:10

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