Nick Saban of Alabama delves into not being out of control: ‘[Texas] A&M bought every player on their team.”

Texas A&M’s Highest Employment Category 2022 He’s always been on the receiving end of the hum surrounding how coach Jimbo Fischer signed more five-star prospects in a single season than he had in the entire Aggies tenure prior to this season. This is life for elite college football recruiting programs. However, on a Wednesday night Alabama Coach Nick Saban said the quiet part out loud – and it wasn’t the only thing he had to get off his chest.

Speaking at the 50-Day Countdown to the World Games, Saban touched on the ways in which Name, Image, and Similarity (NIL) has affected the game. He didn’t pull any punches in the process. Specifically, Saban went straight to Texas A&M as an example of what went wrong with the NIL, flatly accusing the Aggies of buying their recruits through NIL deals.

Saban said as part of a 7-minute answer to a question about NIL that was taped and posted by AL.com. “I’ve read about them. You know who they are. We ranked second in the enlistment last year. [Texas] A&M was the first.

“A&M bought every player on their team – made a name, image, and example deal. We didn’t buy a single player. But I don’t know if we’ll be able to maintain that in the future because more and more people are doing that.”

Saban called NIL a “great concept for players,” noting that Alabama soccer players “created $3 million in opportunities for themselves by doing it the right way” last year. “I don’t have a problem with that, and nobody in our squad had a problem with that because the players who got the money got it,” he added. “There were only 25 players on our team who had the opportunity to earn money.”

This isn’t the first time Texas A&M has been harshly criticized for an elite class, though previous accusations have come anonymously from college football fans — not from the mouth of Excellent Sports Coach. Fisher, a former Saban aide, responded to the idea that the NIL played a role in his program’s recruiting success when asked about it during National Signing Day in February.

“This $30 million deal is a joke. This thing that has some money in it and it was written on BroBible by someone called ‘Sliced ​​Bread’ and all of a sudden the state thought it, it’s a joke,” Fisher said on CBS Sports HQ. “It didn’t affect recruitment at all. The people who wanted to comment on it had no idea what was going on. It’s an insult to the players who come here and the people around us.”

Saban’s comments Friday night weren’t just aimed at Texas A&M. Indeed, during his 7-minute answer, he provided a clear perspective on NIL, including its significant benefits to players and potentially disastrous unintended consequences for college sports as a whole.

Here’s what the Crimson Tide coach also had to say about it.

NCAA application in an almost impossible situation

NCAA Board of Directors Issued new NIL guidelines This month with the intent of cracking down on outside booster groups that are hiding pay-to-play deals for nothing. While the directive is intended to deal with individual issues moving forward, the NCAA said it “may pursue the most egregious violations that were clearly inconsistent with the temporary policy adopted last summer.” Saban explained why these guidelines are difficult to implement.

“People are blaming the NCAA, but in defense of the NCAA, we’re where we are because of the NCAA litigation [for] Transport portal. If the NCAA doesn’t get some litigation protection – whether we should get an antitrust [exemption] Or whatever it is from the federal government’s point of view – that won’t change because they can’t enforce their rules. …

“Jackson State I paid the boy a million dollars last year he was a really good first division player to come to their school. It was in the newspaper, and they bragged about it. Nobody did anything about it. These guys are in Miami that will pay for basketball there $400,000; It’s in the newspaper. The guy tells you how to do it. But the NCAA can’t enforce its rules because it’s not against the law, and that’s a problem. it’s a problem. Unless we have something to protect them from litigation, I don’t know what we’re going to do about it.”

Nothing without law enforcement puts college sports at risk

Saban also echoed his stern warning in April about the sustainability of the NIL in college football when he asked if “that’s what we want for college football.” He’s not alone in expressing that concern, but with NIL deals already rampant across all college athletics, adapting to this world seems like the only option — no matter how hard it may be.

“Our job is not to buy you to come to school here. I don’t know how you run the locker room – and I don’t know if that’s a sustainable model. I know we’re going to lose recruits because someone else would be willing to pay more. …

“The thing I fear is, at some point, they will just say, ‘We’re going to have to pay the players.’ If we start paying the players, we’re going to have to eliminate the sport, and that’s all bad for college sports.

“Maybe we have 450 people on scholarship [in total] in Alabama. … non-profit sports [athletes] who for years and years and years have been able to create a better life for themselves because they have been able to get scholarships and participate in college athletics. This is what college athletics is supposed to be like. It’s not supposed to be something where people come in and make money and you make a decision about where you go in school based on how much money you’re going to make.”

Unorganized gatherings are a big problem

Saban explained that groups, which emerged as a medium for players to receive NIL benefits from reinforcements and alumni, are perhaps the most important component of the NIL that needs to be organized in order to create an even playing field.

“The problem and the problem with the name and the image and the similarity is that the coaches are trying to create an advantage for themselves. They came out and said, ‘Well, how can we use this to our advantage?'” They set up a so-called “collective” … an external marketing agency not connected to the university that is funded by the university alumni. … then this marketing agency transfers it to the players. The coach already knows how much money is in the collection, so he knows how much He can count every player. That’s not the name, image, and example he was meant to be. That’s what he’s become, and that’s the problem with college athletics at the moment…

“Now, on enlistment, we have players in our state who grew up wanting to come to Alabama, and they wouldn’t stick with us unless we said we were going to give them what someone else would give them. My theory in this regard, everything we’ve done in college athletics has always been equal. [Saban refers to scholarships, cost of attendance, etc.] …I told our players, ‘We’re going to have a group team, but everyone will get the same amount of chances from that group.’