Nick Saban proposes a remedy to NIL in college football to Congress

When addressing to a panel of US Senators focused on NIL concerns in Washington, D.C., former Alabama head coach Nick Saban supported the concept of directly sharing money with college football players and other NCAA athletes.

“If we had some sort of revenue-sharing proposition that did not make student-athletes employees… I think that may be the long-term solution,” Saban told the panel, which was chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

“You could create a better quality of life for student-athletes, you could still emphasize development, you can still create brand and athletic development with a system like that and it would be equal in all institutions,” he said. “You couldn’t raise more money at one school to create a competitive advantage at another.”

Since NIL was implemented in college football and other sports nearly three years ago, the NCAA has been largely unable to enforce a single set of rules, with individual states taking the lead on their own legislation, causing confusion among coaches, schools, and other personnel involved in the practice.

Boosters have formed so-called “collectives,” which are independently controlled entities that sign players to NIL contracts on behalf of their favored schools, exacerbating the sense of complexity surrounding rules and regulations.

“We have collectives that in some places are raising huge amounts of money and going to compete against places that do not have the same resources to raise those kinds of funds to pay players,” he said.

“You have a pay-for-play system and a free agency system with no rules, so there is no competitive balance. I believe there will be many places that say that, and we will build a caste system in which the affluent will become richer and the poor will get poorer, and fans will finally look at it and say, ‘I don’t really want to watch this game.'”