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Nick Saban: ‘I would coach in the NFL’ rather than deal with NIL landscape

Jan
23
1/23/2025 1:03:08 AM
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It’s been more than a year since Nick Saban made the shocking decision to finally hang up his whistle and retire from coaching after 50 years in the business — both in college and the NFL.

But that hasn’t stopped the former Alabama head coach from railing against the current college football model in the age of name, image and likeness (NIL) and the NCAA Transfer Portal, Alex Byington of On3 reports.

Saban has been especially critical of how the recent changes to college football have bastardized much of what he first fell in love with as a Kent State assistant under mentor Don James in the mid-1970s.

It’s why the 73-year-old Saban admitted if he was still in the coaching game, he’d rather be doing it in the NFL than in college. That’s quite the statement, especially from Saban, who left his first-and-only NFL head coaching opportunity after just two years (15-17) with the Miami Dolphins to return to college as Alabama‘s head coach in early 2007.

“I loved coaching pro ball, and if I was going to coach today, based on the circumstances in college and in the NFL, I would coach in the NFL, because all those things in college have changed,” Saban said recently on The Pivot Podcast with Ryan Clark, Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder, the latter of whom played for Saban during his two seasons in Miami. “The whole idea of what college used to be is not there anymore. It used to be you went to college to develop value for your future. Now people are going to college to see how much money they can make. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but you change the whole dynamic of the importance of getting an education, making good decisions and choices about what you do and what you don’t do to create value for your future. You changed that whole dynamic.”

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