For a man who vehemently claims that he didn’t retire due to the rise of NIL, college football legend Nick Saban sure has a lot to say about it – particularly as it relates to the fates of other coaches.
In a recent appearance on This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Saban argued that NIL can be played for the near three dozen head coaches that were fired during and after the 2025 college football season. He pointed out that NIL has made it more vital than ever for colleges to maximize the value they get from the money they spend and the coaches wind up paying the consequences of failing to deliver big results.
“How do you evaluate the players? Who are you going to pay? What positions are most important? Because if you pay the wrong guys, and you’ve heard me say this before, you’re (expletive) out of luck,” Saban said. “So when you can’t evaluate the players, and don’t pay the right guys, you’re going to pay the consequences for that in the future because you’re going to spend all this money and not have a very good team. And you’re not going to get the outcome everybody expects.
“Then the cause and effect of paying players is we’re raising money from alumni who now think they should have a say in what happens, and that’s why 33 coaches got fired last year.”
Which way is the sport going?
Thus far, none of the coaches have been fired after one month of college football, though that may certainly change once teams reach the midway point and start to recognize the true direction their program is trending.
Though the plus side of nearly a quarter of all college football teams firing their head coaches last year is that nearly a quarter of all college football head coaches now have at least one or two years of job security. If you factor in all of the coaches who are satisfied with the direction of their programs, we’re probably not going to see quite as many firings in the big jobs as we once did.
But if we do get a similar level of coaching turnover this season, then the sport could be in some trouble. Hundreds of millions of dollars in buyouts are bad for the sport and could create an even wider gap between the haves and have-nots.
It should be no surprise then that Saban is looking for something – anything – to get the sport back to a sense of normalcy.
