Nick Saban expresses concerns after NCAA's latest ruling on sports gambling, NBA scandal

Earlier this week, the NCAA formally adopted a new policy that will allow collegiate student-athletes and athletic department staffers to bet on professional sports, ending the governing body’s longstanding prohibition against all forms of sports gambling. The NCAA’s new policy became official on Wednesday after Division III approved the move for its institutions.

It’s a controversial move, especially this week after the FBI indicted more than 30 people — including at least three current or former NBA stars — related to a multi-year investigation into illegal sports gambling practices. Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were among those arrested Thursday morning in a nationwide sweep that also involved members of the infamous Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese mafia families. Billups and Rozier, who both proclaimed their innocence later Thursday, have since been placed on “immediate leave” by the NBA.

Of course, not everyone is exactly on board with the move, including former Alabama coach Nick Saban, who agreed the new NCAA policy is a slippery slope, especially for student-athletes. During his weekly Friday appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Saban explained the “great lengths” he went to in order to make sure his Crimson Tide players avoided gambling issues at all costs. That included a little tough love with a scared-straight assist from a former mob boss.

“Yeah, I think there’s no question (it’s a slippery slope). … Anytime you have something that’s legal that is against the rules in your sport — gambling is legalized but from an NCAA standpoint, players can’t gamble … on college games now — but that becomes the most difficult circumstance to try to control as a coach,” Saban said Friday on The Pat McAfee Show. “And we went to great lengths – I mean, I talked about it, but I had an FBI guy come in and tell them how they could get caught and technically how they would follow the gambling line and all that, especially if they did it on their phone. And then I had Michael Franzese, who is the only Mafia boss that they didn’t kill when he was in jail, and then he got hired to go speak everywhere. I’d bring him in and he’d scare them to death. Like you might get shot some day if you do the wrong thing.

“So he’d scare them about how bad it was to get involved with people in gambling and how they could force you to do things you didn’t really want to do. We did a lot of things to try to make the players aware that this could be a huge problem for them and how it could affect them in their career.”

Franzese is a former mobster who served as a caporegime or top lieutenant in the notorious Colombo crime family based in New York City during the 1970s and ’80s. Franzese was originally arrested in the mid-1980s for his part in a gasoline bootlegging racket, but also had his hand in a nefarious sports management agency that involved college athletes at the time.

Along with bringing ex-mob bosses to campus, Saban also changed his approach to how he presented information about subjects that could potentially negatively impact the careers of his Alabama players.

“I became very much a guy that talked less about team and more about individuals, thinking that players are selfish, they’re self-absorbed and they’re ambitious, so how do I take advantage of that? And I’d talk to them about all this behavioral stuff that could help them and enhance their value, and all the behavioral stuff that could actually kill them,” Saban added. “And this was one of those things. But they took that part of it better when you made it about them and how it’d affect them, rather than just talking about the team.”