Alabama coach Nick Saban with Lexington Christian Academy quarterback Cutter Boley. (Twitter Photo)
Alabama coach Nick Saban said at Tuesday’s Southeastern Conference Media Days that his players made over $3 million in name, image and likeness deals. But yet he also had a lot of worries about the overall impact of NIL and shared a lot of concerns.
Here’s what he said:
Question: I’ve noticed when you were talking about the key building blocks for a program, you mentioned personal development, academic development and creating value for their football career. You didn’t mention NIL. I know that’s something you’ve weighed in on earlier this off-season. What is your view on how Alabama can get involved in that space? Just because it is changing dynamics in college football whether you like them or not.
Nick Saban: Well, I don’t dislike name, image and likeness. I’m all for the players. I want our players to do well. Our players made over $3 million in name, image and likeness. I’m all for the players being able to do as well as they can and use their name, image and likeness to create value for themselves. We have a great brand at Alabama, so players are certainly — their value there is going to be enhanced because of the value that our brand can help them create.
But the thing that I have sort of expressed, not concerns about, but there’s got to be some uniformity and protocol of how name, image and likeness is implemented. I think there’s probably a couple factors that are important in that.
How does this impact competitive balance in college athletics? And is there transparency to maintain fairness across the board in terms of college athletics? How do we protect the players? Because there’s more and more people that are trying to get between the player and the money.
In the NFL they have guidelines for agents because the NFL Players Association sort of has rules and regulations about how they should professionally help the players. That’s something that we really want to make sure that our players are not being misguided in any way. The biggest concern is how does this impact and affect recruiting? On the recruiting trail right now, there’s a lot of people using this as inducements to go to their school by making promises as to whether they may or may not be able to keep in terms of what players are doing.
I think that is what can create a competitive balance issue between the haves and have not’s. We’re one of the haves. Don’t think that what I’m saying is a concern that we have at Alabama because we’re one of the haves. Everybody in college football cannot do these things relative to how they raise money in a collective or whatever, how they distribute money to players. Those are the concerns that I have in terms of how do we place guidelines around this so that we can maintain a competitive balance. There is no competitive sport anywhere that doesn’t have guidelines on how they maintain some kind of competitive balance. I think that’s important to college football.
I think it’s important to fans. That’s why they have rules in the NFL where you have a salary cap, you have difficult schedules if you have a successful season, you draft later if you have a successful season, you draft early if you have an unsuccessful season. All these things are created so there is competitive balance, which is great for the game and it’s great for fans. Name, image and likeness is not an issue for us at Alabama. Our players I think did better than anybody in the country last year.
3 Responses
So far, and in what I have been able to digest from SEC media days concerning NIL deals in it’s present form, it is nothing but total CONFUSION. Saban is right, it will not be fair for many schools because of the way it is being implemented now. It will not hurt Alabama, Georgia, Texas A&M, not even Tennessee if you watch who they are getting commitments from these days.
NCAA has no clue, and politicians don’t plan on doing anything either is what I hear. So, UK better get a "collective" in place quick! One that can match big dollars with the likes of all the big dogs in the SEC who year after year get the "lion’s share" of the talent. This sort of thing has been going on for years too, NIL just made it legal. UK needs to turn the tables on them in this new age. So,"pay em" to come play for you Coach. Especially if there are going to be no rules or oversight to guide this NIL process.
If you don’t, UK football better get ready to lose on the recruiting trail, and on the field in the near future. Maybe some of you deep pocket coaches at UK kick in a nice sum of cash to get the ball rolling to establish a powerful so called "UK collective" then solicit help from the rich and famous UK alumni and friends in order to stay in the hunt for top football talent nationwide. A blind man could see it.
$3 million dollars for the football team alone. Saban better watch it or he will get hit with the luxury tax penalty. So comes the end to the term student athlete. It’s pay for play now.
Oh, and he was complaining about the Texas A&M NIL payments, lol!