ATLANTA — Alabama coach Nick Saban has navigated through the ever-changing landscape of college athletics plenty of times throughout his coaching career, including the rise of up-tempo offenses, the transition from the BCS to the College Football Playoff and the recruiting budgets that schools began pouring into recruiting once the SEC’s revenue exploded.
Evolving in today’s world is his biggest challenge yet. The confluence of the NCAA’s name, image and likeness rules that allow players to benefit off of their marketing value, along with a transfer portal that is the size of a medium-sized village, has made the job of head coaches more difficult than they’ve ever been. Saban addressed where his program stands after the first year of NIL’s existence Tuesday at SEC Media Days.
“I don’t dislike name, image and likeness. I’m all for the players,” he said. “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.”
Saban supports players making money off of their names, but it’s the lack of consistency that bothers him about the current state of college athletics.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Using NIL as a recruiting inducement is against NCAA rules, but Saban’s primary concern is the lack of enforcement that is happening across the board.
“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,” he said. “I think that is what can create a competitive balance issue between the haves and have nots. We’re one of the…
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