Nick Saban, who left for a new job before bowl game, says players shouldn’t be allowed to leave before bowl games

College football has always had something of a Wild West quality to it.

Conferences and schools have been tweaking the rules in their favor since the sports began. The bowl system makes no logical sense when you stop and think about it with 2024 eyes. We’ve lost count of how many times a school promised not to leave its longtime conference before shuffling off to a new one. And if you believe a head coach anytime they say they intend to stay put for a long time, you’re a sucker.

The people in charge of college football have always had no problem doing whatever they wanted in the name of improving their standing and generating more money.

The only exception is, and always has been, when players try to exercise that same autonomy.

If you’re a college football purist, the modern landscape is a confusing one. NIL and the transfer portal have given players the ability to control their own destinies in ways that were never allowed or available beforehand. And that has terrified coaches, administrators, conference commissioners, and entities like ESPN. The less control they have over players, the more they risk losing out on their revenue streams.

More and more players are deciding to transfer between the end of the regular season and their bowl game, often leaving teams and TV executives without some of the stars they were hoping to have. While head coaches have been leaving for better-paying and higher-profile coaching jobs during this same period for years, no one has ever demanded that a rule be made to limit or prevent it from happening, even though it can have a profound impact on a program as well as its players.

However, as soon as the players started doing it, everyone came out of the woodwork to demand rules and regulations.

Take, for example, Nick Saban, who used his spot on ESPN’s College GameDay Friday to call for rules that would prevent players from transferring until after their team’s bowl games.

“You really can’t blame the players,” said Saban. “Because if you’re gonna have integrity you have to have integrity to a set of rules. I mean, we have a Constitution, we have a Bill of Rights, that’s what this country is built on. We have no rules in college football. I mean, the academic calendar and the football calendar do not match up relative to the season. It should never be that player can leave his team before the end of the football season.”

Saban proposed only allowing players to transfer during a very specific period, saying that the NCAA has “gone overboard a little bit to give these players opportunities.”

Funnily enough, that adherence to integrity and rules and the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to Saban when he left Michigan State for LSU before their bowl game. And we could sit here all day listing out head coaches who made similar moves to better their personal standing or checkbook over concerns for the players they recruited and coached. 

Often a champion of all things college football, College GameDay has also often acted as a hammer on behalf of the sport’s elite and ESPN to tamp down player autonomy, ensuring that the revenue sources they hold so dear remain as profitable as possible (or at least that’s how it can read).

No one would deny that the current setup is messy and easily abused, but also, college football has always been like that. It’s just humorous and a little sad that the only time the adults in the room demand rules and legislation is when the players start to benefit from the chaos.

[College GameDay]