Nick Saban addresses implementation of NIL: This is not 'what college football is supposed to be'

Few coaches are as vocal about the impacts of changes to the sport of college football as Nick Saban. And when you’ve been as successful as Saban has been, everyone will take note. So when Saban discusses the implementation of NIL and how name, image and likeness reform has actually played out in practice, it’s worth taking note.

And the long-time Alabama coach was very blunt Wednesday addressing the topic on Hey Coach & The Nick Saban Show.

“I don’t think the intention was to have collectives where you can actually create opportunities for players to make money and then actually use those opportunities to try to get guys to come to your school,” Saban said. “I don’t think that was the case.”

NIL is just one aspect of college football that has dramatically altered the sport’s landscape in the last few years.

The transfer portal is another. Combine them and you get the absolutely volatile mix we’ve seen this year, even with the NCAA trying to rein things in a touch by implementing designated windows for transfer portal activity.

“Somebody told me there’s already 1500 guys in the portal,” Saban said. “And unless you’re within a year of graduation you can’t even get in the portal until Dec. 5. So what’s to say that when you use the word free agency, why is a guy a free agent? He wants to see what his value is. Can I get more money some place else than I could get here? I’m talking about in the NFL. So what is for people not to do the same thing in college now and say, ‘I’m just going to put my name in the portal and see if somebody will pay me more to go someplace else than what it is here.’

“I don’t think that’s what college football is supposed to be. I don’t think that this is what anybody intended this to be.”

How could implementation of NIL change?

So if the implementation of NIL in college football hasn’t exactly been what was intended, how does the sport go about fixing it now?

There’s a more nuanced answer to that question than you might expect, in part because there’s no uniform set of rules that applies to every program across the country.

“I think the only way that something can be done is it probably has to be done on the federal level, because these circumstances were not created by the NCAA,” Saban said. “They were laws, all right, that were put in place for people’s rights to work and make money.

“I don’t think that it can change until we do something, probably on the federal level, because it is the law.”

But Saban was also perfectly clear on this point: He’s not against NIL.

He just wants to ensure that it’s having the intended effect, acting as a net positive in players’ lives in practice as much as in theory.

“Look, I’m all for players making money,” Saban said. “I’m all for players using their name, image and likeness and if it has value and they created value because of what they did as a college football player — use Bryce Young, Will Anderson, same thing — lot of players on our team have created value for themselves by how they’ve played, and people want to use their name, image and likeness to promote whatever. I think that’s a good thing, and I’m all for it.”

Where’s the happy medium in NIL?

Saban wasn’t finished discussing NIL. He hammered home the point that NIL can be a negative if the proper guardrails aren’t put into place.

What are the current rules incentivizing? Incentives and inducements being in the right places is needed for the activity to follow in the intended manner. And if the activity right now isn’t mirroring what the stated goal of NIL was…

“We spent my entire life trying to get alumni and people and money out of recruiting,” Saban said. “And guys should make decisions on where they can create the most value for their future, because that’s really why you go to college.”

Saban passed along a heart-warming story about a reunion with Muhsin Muhammad, one of his former players at Michigan State, to illustrate his point.

The long-time coach could have turned his back on Muhammad early on during his tenure at Michigan State, but he didn’t. Muhammad went on to have a long and successful NFL career and has now started a family of his own, with several children who have gone to college.

That entire experience was a game-changer for Muhammad. That should be the goal for every student-athlete. Not simply to make as much money as possible while in college at the potential expense of laying down that foundation for the future.

“I’m not really for using these things to encourage people to go to a school relative to what they’ll get for going to the school,” Saban said.

“We all went to college, whichever one of us went to college, to create value for our future. We wanted to have a better life because we created value. Whether it was playing sports and learning lessons of life and being part of a team or if we didn’t play sports we were getting an education so we could develop a career that would give us an opportunity to have success in our life. And it creates a legacy. That’s the thing that’s so important about graduation to me for the players on our team, and I tell the players this all the time. If you graduate, your whole family will go to college.”

Valid food for thought, to be sure.