In Reply to: OT: Nick Saban on College Football posted by hotspot on February 23, 2024 at 09:30:31
This article flays him for being so half-baked.
Where Saban stumbles is also where everyone else in his position starts to lose their footing, because he is incapable of proposing a solution that both adheres to his vision of college sports and makes any goddamn sense. From ESPN:"People can give money to the university again and get a tax deduction for doing it, and the university in some kind of way shares, whether it's share revenue, whether it's buying marketing rights, which is a possibility," Saban suggested. "You can buy somebody's marketing rights as an institution, and I don't want to say cap because that sounds like a salary cap, but find a way for schools to invest the same amount of money in players, just like everybody can invest the same amount in a scholarship. This becomes a part of the scholarship."
And while Saban wants to see players get their share of the financial pie, he said the only way any of this works is if there's also a commitment on the players' side.
"Just like an NFL player has a contract or a coach has a contract, something in place so you don't have all this raiding of rosters and mass movement," he said. "I wonder what fans are going to say when they don't even know the team from year to year because there's no development of teams, just bringing in new players every year."
Saban said he is not nearly as well versed on the legality of everything as such people as SEC commissioner Greg Sankey or Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne.
- ESPN
This sort of chin-stroking—which produces ideas that tiptoe toward specificity before scurrying away in a panic and acknowledging that there hasn't been much thought put into important questions like, "Is that actually legal?"—is encountered pretty regularly these days on the topic of "saving" college football. The reason this brand of nonsense keeps getting spit out by Saban and others who share his concerns is because their ideas are constrained by the incoherence of their vision for the sport. What they want—some system that allows players to earn money but also restricts their movement without recognizing them as employees—does not make any sense, and that's how you end up with Saban talking in circles about a salary cap that's somehow not a salary cap, because he knows that salaries are something that employees have, and that caps are something that are collectively bargained between labor and management. It's how you end up with him suggesting that players be committed to their programs by "something in place" that is somehow not a contract, because contracts are what professionals sign. Watching Saban talk about this stuff is like watching someone try to teach geocentrism in 2024.