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Nick Saban isn’t working the sidelines anymore. The college football coaching legend has a very different view right now, but he’s still watching closely.
And Saban, now a college football analyst for ESPN, doesn’t like some of what he sees.
Specifically, the 73-year-old who’s seen it all in the sport and won 7 national championships along the way doesn’t like the lack of organization when it comes to how the college football calendar lines up — or doesn’t line up, in Saban’s case. Saban let his feelings be known during Friday night’s College GameDay show from South Bend that led into the Indiana-Notre Dame first-round Playoff game.
“You really can’t blame the players because if you’re going to have integrity, you’ve got to have integrity to a set of rules,” explained Saban. “We have a constitution, we have a Bill of Rights, that’s what this country was built on. We have no rules in college football. The academic calendar and the football calendar do not match up relative to the season.”
Saban really hates the fact that players can bolt to the transfer portal before their team’s season is even over.
“It should never be that a player can leave his team before the end of the football season,” he said. “You don’t need to be a free agent twice a year. You can be a free agent once a year, and if it was in May, the season’s over. People will say, ‘Well, I couldn’t go to spring practice.’ Well, you could find out what your role on your team is going to be in spring practice, and you might be a starter and not need to transfer.”
For now, until more rules are set, Saban and others who don’t like the current system are going to have to deal with how things are.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
