Nick Saban isn't fooling anyone with hypocritical stance on NIL changes

I don’t doubt Nick Saban was ethical during the peak of his coaching career at Alabama. He doesn’t seem like the type to pass money back and forth in brown paper bags to sway a player to choose Tuscaloosa over anywhere else. 

For one, Saban wasn’t just building a championship team year in and year out, he was producing an NFL factory as well. So that was always going to be the most attractive trait about playing for Saban and the Crimson Tide. 

That said, it’s hard to believe Alabama was able to produce some of the best rosters of all time, doing it the right way every time, though I guess it’s not impossible. Saban’s harsh stance on the state of NIL makes me want to believe he or his staff never recruited outside the lines. 

NIL balanced the scales for college football's heavyweights

Once players were allowed to benefit off their name, image and likeness legally, it threw a wrench in the entire recruiting process. It was harder to keep up because now a player could go to any top program to collect a check.

That might be the best thing that came from it. Look at this past season. Just two SEC teams qualified for the College Football Playoff. No matter how much the CFP committee tried to advocate for more at-large spots, the Big Ten nearly monopolized the playoff. 

In years past it felt more like an SEC invitational than it did a true playoff that rewarded teams for having good seasons. The biggest talking point throughout the playoff was Ohio State’s expensive roster. 

There is no way Ohio State would have been able to retain its best players and dip into the transfer portal for more additions and out-duel the likes of Georgia, Alabama and some of the other blue bloods in previous years. I’m not saying they would have been in last place, but they wouldn’t have been able to simply pick and choose. 

NIL has allowed teams like Ohio State to level the playing field, or even a school like Michigan to be able to lure the No. 1 recruit in the country from LSU so he could secure the bag. That’s all it took. 

If Bryce Underwood truly wanted to go to the best possible situation, LSU smokes Michigan. They’ve produced more NFL-worthy quarterbacks in the last five years. The SEC’s TV deal with ESPN is the most lucrative in college football. And at the end of the day, the tradition of the SEC is unmatched. 

So yeah, Saban may be aggressively against NIL or at least against how there’s really no regulations around it. But I’m sure he was very familiar with having to talk down overly aggressive, under-the-table offers to keep the Crimson Tide atop college football when he was coach.