Nick Saban Claims Alabama Players Made $3 Million from NIL Last Year

Alabama coach Nick Saban hasn’t been afraid to make his thoughts known on the introduction of name, image and likeness to college football over the last year and addressed the hot-button topic once again on the second day of the SEC’s 2022 Media Days. 

Speaking to a room of reporters Tuesday, Saban spoke candidly about how NIL has manifested itself at Alabama, making clear that the players in his program have benefited greatly under the NCAA’s new policies that allow student athletes to profit off of their own NIL. 

The Crimson Tide coach even offered up a number, suggesting that his players made a combined $3 million in NIL deals, which he thought might be “better than anybody in the country last year.”

“Well, I don’t dislike name, image and likeness. I’m all for the players. I want the 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 using their name, image and likeness to create value for themselves,” Saban said via the SEC Network.

Despite his own program’s success in the NIL space, Saban reiterated his hesitations about the changing landscape and voiced a number of lingering questions that he hopes will be answered as NIL continues to engrain itself in college football.

“We have a great brand at Alabama so our players, their value is going to be enhanced because of the value that our brand can help them create. But you know, the thing that I’ve sort of expressed, not concerns about, but there’s gotta be some uniformity in protocol of how NIL is implemented,” Saban said.

“I think there’s probably a couple of factors that are important: how does this impact competitive balance in college athletics? 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 between money and the player? … The biggest concern is how does this impact and affect recruiting because on the recruiting trail there’s a lot of people using this as inducements to go to their school by making promises that they may or may not be able to keep. That is what can create a competitive balance issue between the haves and have nots.”

Saban quickly followed up by clarifying that he sees Alabama as one of the “haves” but expressed some concern for other programs around the country that might not have the same resources and infrastructure that he has in Tuscaloosa.

“But everybody in college football cannot do things relative to how they raise money in a collective or whatever and how they distribute money to players,” he said. “So those are the concerns that I have in terms of how do we place guidelines around this so that we can maintain a competitive balance.

“There’s no competitive sport anywhere that doesn’t have guidelines on how they maintain some kind of competitive balance. And I think that’s important to college football.”

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