Former Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban has experienced more success leading a college football program than perhaps anyone else in history.
Recently, Saban made headlines after President Donald Trump named him as a potential member of a commission on college sports that the president hopes to establish.
However, Saban has expressed some hesitation about the idea. He stepped away from the college football world just as the NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) era and the transfer portal began to take off—making his involvement in shaping the sport’s future particularly interesting.
Nick Saban answers back at Donal Trump’s idea
“First of all, I don’t know a lot about the commission. Secondly, I’m not sure we really need a commission,” Saban said on The Paul Finebaum Show. “I think a lot of people know exactly what the issues are in college football and exactly what we need to do to fix them. The key to the drill is getting people together to move it forward.
“I’m not opposed to players making money—I don’t want anybody to think that. I just think the system that we use, the way it’s going right now, it is not sustainable and probably not in the best interest of the student-athletes across the board or the game itself.”
We are currently in one of the wildest eras in the history of college football. Super teams are largely becoming a thing of the past—aside from programs like Ohio State last year, which managed to return a significant number of draft-eligible players. With NIL, money is being spread around more evenly. While top programs still attract elite talent, we’re beginning to see that talent distributed more widely across the country.
The conversation around how to manage this new era of college football is ongoing, and the landscape will likely continue to change dramatically. After all, we’ve reached a point where Donald Trump and Nick Saban are being discussed in the same sentence.
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BY BRANDON LITTLE
Brandon joined A to Z Sports in August of 2023 as an assistant editor. You can find Brandon’s work below, which includes Cleveland Browns and Ohio State football coverage. Also, Brandon provides overall coverage of the NFL at times. The 2023 season will be Brandon’s fifth covering the Browns, as he spent the previous four with Sports Illustated/FanNation. Brandon comes from North Central Ohio and has been in the sports writing business in since 2017. Additionally, Brandon has covered the Ohio State Buckeyes, Cleveland Guardians, and high school sports in the past.
