"Blame the system": Nick Saban calls out College Football as players move towards 'self-indulgent' practices
Former Alabama head coach Nick Saban joined the Pat McAfee Show Wednesday to discuss the current state of college football and he did not hold back. Saban called out the current system for pushing players to focus on their individual success rather than the success of the team.
“What we’ve created is a system that promotes self-indulgent behavior. In other words, ‘How does this affect me?’ We used to be on a team where the first thing that you thought about was, ‘How does this affect the team?’ If you made a mistake, or whatever, it killed you because you let your teammates down. I don’t know if you could blame the players for this, but I think you can blame the system to some degree because it promotes this. Everything about the system promotes this.”
Saban pointed out the impact of loosened transfer rules and NIL deals on the loyalty of players to their team.
"So what kind of value are you creating for yourself if you're not committed to being the best player that you can be? You're not creating value yourself, you're not creating value for your future, it's gonna affect where you get drafted. All these things are anti-development, I call it, which is not a good thing for college players."
Saban highlights potential issue with new College Football Playoff format
With the chaos of the 2024 season, it isn’t surprising Nick Saban is being vocal. During his Wednesday appearance, one of the points he expressed was the structure of the current College Football Playoff format.
The playoff is structured so the top five ranked conference champions receive an automatic postseason bid, and the top four will be granted a bye during the first round. Saban believes that this could lead to potential drawbacks.
“By giving the conference champions, when they’re not the highest-ranked teams, the bye … what it really affects is the path to the championship ... when you don’t seed the teams based on the quality of the total season performance, the number one seed should have, technically, the easiest path to the championship, and that doesn’t really happen when you allow conference champions to get seeded in the top 4 when they’re not one of the top-four teams.”
Nick Saban’s argument is teams with three losses shouldn’t be able to make it to the playoff.
“I do think as we boil down to this, like right now, hard to reward a team with three losses. Especially the kind of losses Ole Miss had and like Alabama’s had to you know pretty .500 teams is what I call them. Pretty average teams. You’ve got other teams that maybe they didn’t play the same competition, but they didn’t lose games to average teams either.“
Saban believes the Georgia Bulldogs are the only team that has an argument to get in with three losses. Other teams that didn't play in the championship that have two losses should not get in.