Coaching Legend Nick Saban Shares His Concerns About College Sports, NIL

Since his retirement, Nick Saban has been vocal about many things regarding collegiate sports, and NIL was one of his topics this time around.

Feb 17, 2024; Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA; Alabama Crimson Tide former head football coach Nick Saban looks on during a basketball game between Alabama and the Texas A&M Aggies at Coleman Coliseum / Gary CosbyJr.-USA TODAY Sports

It's certainly a new era in college sports as Name, Image, and Likeness continues to take over and dominate the landscape of athletics.

Coaching staffs in high-profile, revenue generating sports have to adjust to this environment where high schools athletes are expecting to receive compensation for their services if they are going to commit to a college or university.

This change has caused many of the "older guard" across these different sports to leave.

Alabama football felt that when the best college football coach of all time, Nick Saban, decided to call it a career after the Crimson Tide were eliminated from the College Football Playoff last season against Michigan.

Saban was subsequently hired by ESPN as an analyst of College GameDay, so he will still be around and covering the sport.

This has given him a platform to discuss what is taking place in college football, and he shared his thoughts on the state of college athletics and concerns he has with NIL moving foward.

"One of the things that bothers me most about all of what's happened in college sports right now is I've been around long enough to remember when we didn't have any standards towards education. We didn't have any progress toward a degree rules, we didn't have great graduation rates. And we worked for 25 years to get it to where we have really, really positive results when it comes to academics, graduation, degree programs ... And I'm afraid that this transferring and what's happening right now in college athletics is going to impact that ...," the coaching legend said per Nick Schultz of On3.

What Saban is saying isn't coming out of left field.

These have been concerns vocalized by many people involved in college athletics who think that the current NIL landscape, which isn't really being regulated, has allowed 18-to-22-year-old kids to only search for short-term money instead of thinking about what is best for their futures.

The difference here is that when Saban says something, people listen.

"I don't want to see five years from now, a whole bunch of 30 for 30s about guys who made a little bit of money when they were in college, but they don't have very much success in their life now because they didn't prepare themselves for life after football. Those two things, to me, are the biggest concerns that I have," he added.

NIL is a tool that, if used right, puts money in the pockets of college athletes after achieving success in their sport and being a popular, marketable figures.

Right now, it's being used in a different way, luring high school athletes to different programs around the country. Then naturally, the other shoe drops and the future classes of athletes now have a "price" they need in NIL dollars for them to even consider a school.

That's not the case for every athlete, but there is certainly enough of that going around to make Saban, who has coached for a long time and dealt with this new era, to be concerned about where college football is going.