Nick Saban pours water on President Trump's college sports panel

Nick Saban was being talked up as the likely head of President Donald Trump’s proposed college sports commission, but now the former Alabama head coach wonders if we really need it.

“First of all, I don’t know a lot about the commission. Secondly, I’m not sure we really need a commission,” Saban said in comments to The Paul Finebaum Show.

He added: “I think that a lot of people know exactly what the issues are in college football and exactly what we need to do to fix them. The key to the drill is getting people together so we can move it forward.”

Nick Saban on his recent talks with the White House about a potential commission on college sports.

"I don't think I should be the tip of the spear...I would just like to help anyone who seeks to fix it." pic.twitter.com/DNoUS1LMI1
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) May 14, 2025

Last week, it was reported that President Trump was considering the creation of a federal commission to look into the state of college sports, and that Saban was being floated as a potential co-chair of the body.

The group is expected to include college sports “stakeholders”, businessmen with “deep” connections to college football, and “perhaps, even a former coach and administrator,” according to Yahoo Sports.

If it goes ahead, the commission would investigate the general college sports landscape, including transfer portal usage, booster payments to players, athletes’ employment status, and even the composition of conferences and their media contracts.

Saban also confirmed speculation that the idea for a national college sports panel came after he met with President Trump at the Alabama commencement ceremony recently.

“He said, ‘All my friends are saying college football is really messed up. Let’s get together so we can figure out how to fix it.’ So that’s how this all started,” Saban recalled Trump saying at the time.

“But I really don’t want to get into the implementation of what I would do. I think the first thing is everybody’s got a different state law, which creates advantages and disadvantages. And everybody is trying to create advantages. So we probably need an interstate commerce type something that gets it all there.”

And while Saban says he supports athletes being paid, he decried the current system as unsustainable and not in players’ best interests.

“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the players to necessarily be employees,” he said. “And I think authentic name, image, and likeness is good for players, but I don’t think pay-for-play is necessarily what we want.”

Whatever anyone wants likely isn’t going to be solved in the near-term future, given the wide range of interests involved, disagreement on how to realize them, the notoriously slow process of decision making in Washington, and the already-complicated systems currently in place.

Maybe a national college sports commission is the answer, and maybe it isn’t. At this point, no one really knows.

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