Everything Nick Saban Said About the Protect College Sports Act

U.S. Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell recently proposed a bill called the "Protect College Sports Act."

College sports have gotten a bit out of control with NIL and the transfer portal, and these two have worked on a plan to alter that. The proposed items include a five-year eligibility limit, one penalty-free transfer for athletes, limiting conference consolidation and much more. The SEC and Big Ten made a joint statement on Tuesday, saying they're opposed to the bill.

A hearing was held at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. on Wednesday morning, and former Alabama head coach Nick Saban was a witness. He shared his stance on the bill while making a roughly 11-minute opening statement. Here's everything he said:

"Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I really want everybody here to know that I'm not here to represent a conference or a team, but to preserve college athletics as a whole. You know, I think we all have to ask ourselves a question: What is our guiding principles for the future of college athletics, including Olympic, women and non-revenue sports.

"I've spent my adult life in college athletics. I believe in it. I've seen people come, young people come in the program, need structure, need discipline, need coaching, need academic support, need accountability, and I've seen them leave with a degree, a career, a family, and a better chance to be successful in life. I think the current system that we have in college athletics right now makes it more and more difficult to do these things. We've moved away from development to focusing on money and not life skills.

"So to put this in perspective, if you had the biggest, baddest Ferrari that you could ever have, and it was going 150 miles an hour toward the Grand Canyon, somebody needs to tap the brakes, and I think that's what we all need to do here, and I'm going to veer a little way from my testimony and just give you some examples of things that I think people may not know that are happening in college football that are huge problems.

"First of all, I think student athletes should profit from name, image, and likeness, as long as those things are authentic endorsements. They create branding for themselves, they sign with the company, they do promotions. I think these things are all healthy for their education, as well as their quality of life. I think name, image, and likeness has become pay-for-play.

"I said five or six years ago when a school that I'm not going to mention, who didn't do anything wrong, had what is called a collective. A collective is an organization that raises money basically from alumni to be able to pay players and disguise it as marketing opportunities. When a school did that, the first school that did it, I said, 'Is this what we want college football to become?' And I got really criticized for that, but it has become that, and it's become pay-for-play.

"And we've also extended the opportunities now to funnel money from operations, which come to the universities as marketing opportunities from the university standpoint to funnel that money out of operations into paying players, so now if you take that $20 million or whatever it is, you could fund five or six Olympic and women's sports. So these are things that I think need to be addressed, and I think this bill takes a big step forward in doing that.

"I think this bill also creates a competitive balance, you know, the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, they all have some kind of rules that govern how they compete, it creates parity, it creates, you know, something that gives you the opportunity to have a framework to build a fair play system, in which I think is really, really important, and I think this bill does that. Right now, in college football, we have no rules, we have state laws, we have different in every state. We have litigation. The NCAA cannot enforce their own rules, because every time they try to enforce the rule, there's a lawsuit.

"So, I mean, an example would be Ole Miss quarterback, they say he can't play next year. He's playing next year because of litigation. So, but this is just the way it is. It's become an arm race. Who spends the most has got the best chance to win, but I think it's a race to the bottom, because if you don't spend to win, you lose your fan base, and you don't have any revenue. So, how do you manage the other sports?

"So, the one thing that I think this bill does, you know, sort of enhance the enforcement of the House settlement, which to me is a start, which sort of creates a revenue share kind of a cap, and also controls some of the name, image, and likeness things that this bill tries to control.

"So transferring, you know, I think transferring is a good thing. I don't think a player should be trapped in a bad situation, but I also think multiple transfers have a negative effect. I think there can be legitimate circumstances where you can transfer more than once. I think if you graduate, you should be able to transfer again, because you might have a fifth year where you can have more success someplace else, but unlimited transfers creates free agency. Free agency with a collective, now you're talking about bidding more for players. Then you've got agents out there that are not certified that are enhancing players or encouraging players to get in the portal. I can get you more money.

"So now we have this unbelievable number of players that get in a portal every year, and we have nothing to control agents. We have nothing to control tampering. Clemson had a player that was on campus for a whole week, and they come and got him off the campus and took them someplace else. These kinds of things going on in college football are absolutely not what any of us signed up for relative to the educational institutions that we've all tried to represent.

"So, what's the cause and effect of transfering? I think every time you transfer, you have less and less of an opportunity to graduate. This hits home with me because I actually coached 50 years ago when people didn't graduate, and we saw 30 for 30 on what happened to their life, and we worked hard for a long time to get graduation rates where they are, and I'm proud of the fact that we had 668 or whatever the number is, you know, graduates at Alabama over 17 years.

"So we need to get back to, you know, that kind of atmosphere in college athletics. But if you transfer all the time, so first of all, we had players transfer that were in business. So they transfer, they couldn't get business school with it, school they transferred to, so they got general studies, so they could be eligible, so they minimized the importance of their degree, because they transferred. And then also, could they graduate. You got guys transfer in three or four years, we have guys playing seven or eight years of college football, which is ridiculous. We had 50 players in the draft this year that were over 25 years old competing against 17 and 180-year-olds, only because we have no structure in terms of what is eligibility.

"So, the eligibility rule of five years is a really good thing, I think. I think we should protect prep schools if somebody wants to improve their academic circumstance, their clock shouldn't start, and they should still have five years after that. And I think defining who is a pro. I know a guy came from the G League, that's a pro. There's also guys coming from Europe that are pros that are not under the same rules and regulations. I think all those things need to be controlled, so the collective. What if we continue to invest more and more in football and basketball?

"Let me give you the history. My first year we had collective at Alabama, 2.7 million. Next year, 7 million. Next year, 10 million. I retired. Next year, 17 million. Next year, 24 million. Now you have schools that have close to $40 million rosters. So, if we continue to do that, we're going to lose Olympic sports, we're going to lose non-revenue sports, we're going to lose scholarships, and basically, what's going to happen is, you're going to have football and basketball succeed, and we'll have club sports for everything else with no scholarships. That's, that's horrible. I mean, we can't let that happen. And I think we have to continue to figure out ways that we can raise revenue, so that we can keep all sports and all opportunities for all young people intact.

"I think we have to protect scholarships. We mentioned that. Injury, roster decisions, athletic performance should not be reasons to get rid of a player, but what we've created now with the portal, which we think is a good thing, all a coach has to say to a player that's not very good is, 'Get in the portal, I don't want you on the team.' So he gets in the portal and maybe doesn't get an opportunity. 30% of the people who get in the portal don't get an opportunity, so nobody talks about those things, and it minimizes, because everybody recruits out of the portal. How many young people out of high school get an opportunity to get a scholarship and play college football and start a career?

"So I think medical protection, injury protection, and health care are something that's really, really important, but I also think that Congress does not need to micromanage college athletics. There's lots of people out there that can help us do that. Congress does need to fix the mess, and the courts create a national framework, so people inside college sports can enforce fair rules without legal certainty. Every rule becomes another lawsuit, every standard becomes another risk, and the system keeps drifting toward the professional model.

"I believe we want an education-based model that compensates athletes fairly, protects athletes properly, and still preserves development, competition, opportunity, and tradition. That is what this bill is trying to do. It isn't perfect, and I'm sure many, many adjustments need to be made, and I think there's a lot of people who can add to that, but this is a serious bipartisan effort to bring order to a system that badly needs fixing.

"I don't think this is bipartisan, I think it should be nonpartisan. It's that important in terms of college athletics, in terms of the future for young people. It protects athletes, it protects opportunity, it protects competitive balance, it protects the sports that do not always generate revenue but still matter. It gives college athletes a chance to move forward with rules that are clear, national, and enforceable. For these reasons, I support the Protect College Sports Act, and urge Congress to act. Thank you."

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