Nick Saban speaks about competitive balance with NIL, says Alabama players made $3 million last year
By Keith Farner
Published:
Nick Saban has made waves with his comments about name, image and likeness, and how NIL has changed college athletics. He shared many of those same sentiments on Tuesday from the podium at SEC Media Days.
“I don’t dislike name, image and likeness,” the Alabama coach said. “I’m all for the players. I want players to do well. Our players did extremely well last year, they made over $3 million in name, image and likeness. So I’m all for the players doing as well as they can, and use their name, image and likeness to create value for themselves. We have a great brand at Alabama, so players are certainly — their value there is certainly going to be enhanced because of the value that our brand can help them create.”
Saban then referred to a message he’s shared before.
“There’s got to be some uniformity and protocol of how name, image and likeness is implemented,” Saban said. “I think there’s probably a couple factors that are important in that. How does this impact competitive balance in college athletics, and is there transparency to maintain fairness across the board in terms of college athletics, and how do we protect the players because there’s more and more people that are trying to get in between the player and the money.”
Saban spoke about how the NFL Players Association has rules and regulations around agents, and he doesn’t want college players to be misguided in any way.
“The biggest concern is how does this impact and affect recruiting because on the recruiting trail right now there’s a lot of people using this as inducements to go to their school by making promises as to whether they may or may not be able to keep,” Saban said. “In terms of what players are doing and I think that is what can create a competitive balance issue between the haves and the have nots, and we’re one of the haves. So don’t think that what I’m saying is a concern about what we have at Alabama because we’re one of the haves. But everybody in college athletics cannot do these things relative to how they raise money in a collective or whatever and how they distribute money to players.”
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
