Nick Saban explains basketball-like metrics he submitted to rank College Football Playoff teams

Now two years into his post-coaching “retirement,” Nick Saban has heard all the complaints about the current state of college football. That includes issues around NIL, the NCAA Transfer Portal, revenue-sharing and even how to fix the College Football Playoff committee’s selection process.

Some have even called on the former Alabama head coach to adopt the mantle of a yet-to-be-created “Commissioner of College Football” to address all that ails the sport. And while his current role as an analyst on ESPN‘s College GameDay has provided him a pulpit to continue to impact the game he loves, Saban recently took it upon himself to do even more.

During Saban’s most recent Friday appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, ESPN’s Pat McAfee revealed college football’s only seven-time national champion coach submitted what McAfee affectionately termed “Saban-metrics” to the powers that be in an effort to address concerns about how the CFP Selection Committee evaluates teams in its weekly rankings. Effectively, Saban called on the College Football Playoff to adopt a similar grading system to college basketball’s NET ratings system.

“The way the Playoff is set up, you get penalized a lot more for losing than you do a big win, and that shouldn’t be that way. We should have a culture where you enhance people that play a better schedule, and by playing a better schedule and beating more good teams, you have a better chance to get into the Playoffs,” Saban said Friday on The Pat McAfee Show. “(Right now) there’s no incentive for a college team to play a tough schedule because you’re going to get penalized for a bad loss. I don’t like that, I hope we change it, (and) I’ve submitted things to try to change it. … It’s very similar to the way they do basketball with Tier 1 wins, Tier 2 wins and all that stuff.”

The NET — NCAA Evaluation Tool — rankings replaced college basketball’s previous RPI metrics prior to the 2018-19 season and includes a Team Value Index that rewards teams for beating “quality opponents,” especially on the road, as well its “adjusted efficiency” that takes into consideration the strength of opponent and location (home/away/neutral) across all games in a season.

Nick Saban wants Power leagues to unite behind joint media rights agreement

Saban also called on the Power Four conferences to come together and collectively bargain a single media rights deal with multiple television properties, much like the NFL does. Of course, with each Power Four — or five if including the rebuilding Pac-12 — currently signed to highly lucrative media rights deals through the early 2030s, a joint renegotiation would be challenging and unlikely in the near future.

“The second thing is, we need to change the metrics of every conference (having) their own TV (media deals),” Saban continued. “We need to have more of a NFL model where we have all the major conferences do a (joint) TV deal and just like the NFL, make sure there’s a good game on every Sunday that people are going to be interested in watching.

“And then we’d have more good games, because only the Top 70 teams would play each other. And you’d have to play those teams. So you’d have better games to watch, (it’d be) better for the fans, create more revenue for the schools and it’d just be better for everybody.”

Whether or not any of Saban’s suggestions ultimately come to pass, is not yet clear. But college football fans everywhere are just happy to see someone being proactive about fixing their favorite sport.