Nick Saban testifies for Protect College Sports Act, what he told the U.S. Senate
Nick Saban testifies for Protect College Sports Act, what he told the U.S. Senate
Colin Gay, Tuscaloosa News Wed, June 3, 2026 at 4:04 PM UTC
0
Nick Saban testifies for Protect College Sports Act, what he told the U.S. Senate
Nick Saban took center stage in the college athletics world Wednesday, June 3. And all the former Alabama football coach had to do was take the microphone.
Saban spoke as one of five witnesses at a U.S. Senate committee hearing to support the "Protect College Sports Act," one that creates national rules for college athletics, cracking down on topics such as name, image and likeness, and transfers.
Here's everything Saban said:
Nick Saban U.S. Senate opening statement
Saban: "Thank you Chairman (Ted) Cruz, I could use a little of that Cuban coffee. I didn't sleep much last night because of this testimony. Ranking Member (Maria) Cantwell, and members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify.
"I really want everybody to know I’m not here to represent a conference or a team, but to preserve college athletics as a whole. I think we all have to ask ourselves a question: what is our guiding principles for the future of college athletics, including Olympic, women and non-revenue sports.
NICK SABAN: Why Nick Saban brought up Alabama NIL collective during U.S. Senate hearing
"I have spent my adult life in college athletics. I believe in it. I have seen players come into a program need need structure, need discipline, need coaching, need academic support, need accountability, and I have seen them leave with a degree, a career, a family, and a better chance to be successful in life.
"I think the current system of what we have in college athletics right now makes it more and more difficult to do these things. We moved away from development to focusing on money and not life skills.
"To put this in perspective, if you had the biggest, baddest Ferrari that you could ever have, and it was going 150 mph toward the Grand Canyon, somebody needs to tap the brakes. And that's what I think we all need to do here.
"I'm going to veer a little bit from my testimony and just give you some examples of things that I think people may not know that are happening in college football that are huge problems.
"First of all, I think student athletes should profit from name, image, and likeness, as long as those things are authentic endorsements. They create branding for themselves, they sign with the company, they do promotions. I think these things are healthy for their education as well as their quality of life.
I think name, image and likeness has turned into pay-for-play. I said, five or six years ago, when a school I'm not going to mention who didn't do anything wrong, had what is called a collective. A collective is an organization that raises money, basically from alumni, to be able to pay players and disguise it as marketing opportunities. When a school did that, the first school that did it, I said, is this what we want college football to become? And I got really criticized for them. But it has become that. It's become pay-for-play.
And we've also extended the opportunities to funnel money from operations, which come to the universities as marketing opportunities form a university standpoint, to funnel that opportunity out of operations into paying players. So if you take that $20 million or whatever it is, you can fund five or six Olympic and women's sports. These are things I think need to be addressed. And I think this bill takes the big step forward of doing that.
"The bill also creates a competitive balance. The NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, they all have some kind of rules that govern how they compete. It creates parity, it creates something that gives you the opportunity to have a framework to build a fair play system in, which I think if very important. I think this bill does that.
"Right now, in college football, we have no rules. We have state laws, different in every state. We have litigation. The NCAA cannot enforce its own rules because every time they try and enforce their own rules, there's a lawsuit.
"So, I mean, an example would be Ole Miss' quarterback, they say he can't play next year, he's playing next year because of litigation. But this is just the way it is. It's become an arm race. Who spends the most has got the best chance to win. But I think it's a race to the bottom because if you don't spend to win, you lose your fan base and you don't have any revenue. So how do you manage the other sports?
"So the one thing that I think this bill does, you know, sort of enhance the enforcement of the house settlement, which to me is a start, which sort of creates a revenue-share kind of a cap, and also controls some of the name, image, and likeness things that this bill tries to control.
"So, transferring, you know, I think transferring is a good thing. I don't think a player should be trapped in a bad situation. But I also think multiple transfers have a negative effect. I think there can be legitimate circumstances where you can transfer more than once. I think if you graduate, you should be able to transfer again, because you might have a fifth year where you can have more success someplace else. But unlimited transfers creates free agency. Free agency with a collective, now you're talking about bidding war for players. And then you've got agents out there that are not certified that are enhancing players or encouraging players to get in the portal, 'I can get you more money.' So now we have this unbelievable number of players that get in a portal every year, and we have nothing to control agents, we have nothing to control tampering.
"You know. Clemson had a player that was on campus for a whole week, and they come and got him off the campus and took him someplace else. So these kinds of things going on in college football are absolutely not what anybody of any of us signed up for relative to the educational institutions that, you know, we've all tried to represent.
Advertisement
"So what's the cause and effect of transferring? I think every time you transfer, you have less and less of an opportunity to graduate. This hits home with me because I actually coached 50 years ago when people didn't graduate, and we saw 30-for-30s on what happened to their life, and we worked hard for a long time to get graduation rates where they are, and I'm proud of the fact that we had 668, or whatever the number is, you know, graduates at Alabama over 17 years. So we need to get back to, you know, that kind of atmosphere in college athletics. But if you transfer all the time... So, first of all, we had players transfer that were in business. So they transferred. They couldn't get in business school (in the) school they transferred to, so they got in general studies, so they could be eligible. They minimized the importance of their degree because they transferred.
"And then also could they graduate? You got guys transferring three or four years. We have guys playing seven or eight years of college football, which is ridiculous. We had 50 players in the draft this year that were over 25 years old. Competing against 17 and 18 year olds only because we have no structure in terms of what is eligibility. So the eligibility rule of five years is a really good thing.
"I think, I think we should protect prep schools. If somebody wants to improve their academic circumstance, their clock shouldn't start. They should still have five years after that.
"And I think defining who is a pro? I know a guy came from the G League. That's a pro. There's also guys coming from Europe that are pros that are not under the same rules and regulations. I think all those things need to be controlled.
"So, the collective, what if we continue to invest more and more in football and basketball? Let me give you the history. My first year we had collective at Alabama, $2.7 million. Next year, $7 million. Next year, $10 million. I retired. Next year, $17 million. Next year, $24 million. Now you have schools that have close to $40 million rosters. So if we continue to do that, we're going to lose Olympic sports. We're going to lose non-revenue sports. We're going to lose scholarships, and, basically, what's going to happen is we're going to have football and basketball succeed, and we'll have club sports for everything else with no scholarships. That's horrible. I mean, we can't let that happen and I think we have to continue to figure out ways that we can raise revenue so that we can keep all sports and all opportunities for all young people intact.
"I think we have to protect scholarships. We mentioned that. Injury, roster decisions, athletic performance should not be reasons to get rid of a player. But what we've created now with the portal, which we think is a good thing, Aa l a coach has to say to a player that's not very good is, 'Get in the portal, I don't want you on the team.' So he gets in a portal, and maybe doesn't get an opportunity. 30% of the people who get in the portal don't get an opportunity. So nobody talks about those things, and it minimizes, because everybody recruits out of the portal, how many young people out of high school get an opportunity to get a scholarship and play college football and start a career?
"So, I think medical protection, injury protection and health care are something that's really, really important. But I also think that Congress does not need to micromanage college athletics. There's lots of people out there that can help us do that. Congress does need to fix the mess in the courts, create a national framework so people inside college sports can enforce fair rules. Without legal certainty, every rule becomes another lawsuit, every standard becomes another risk and the system keeps drifting toward the professional model.
"I believe we want an education-based model that compensates athletes fairly, protects athletes properly and still preserves development, competition, opportunity, and tradition. That is what this bill is trying to do. It isn't perfect, and I'm sure many, many adjustments need to be made, and I think there's a lot of people who can add to that. But this is a serious bipartisan effort to bring order to a system that badly needs fixing.
"I don't think this is bipartisan. I think it should be nonpartisan. It's that important in terms of college athletics, in terms of the future for young people. It protects athletes, it protects opportunity, it protects competitive balance. It protects the sports that do not always generate revenue, but still matter. It gives college athletes a chance to move forward with rules that are clear, national, and enforceable. For these reasons, I support the Protect College Sports Act, and urge Congress to act. Thank you."
Nick Saban on agents, NCAA transfer portal
Saban: "We mentioned this before, earlier in our testimony, that I think it's imperative that student athletes, their families, have protection from agents. Right now, you don't have to be registered to be an agent for a college player. So anybody on the street can do it. We don't have any regulation on how much they can charge."
U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn: "Should their fees be capped?"
Saban: "No question. I think that, you know, if you look at NFL, they're 3-5% We have college players paying 20%. We have agents that encourage players to get in the portal when it's really not in their best interest to get in the portal, only to try to stimulate more revenue for them, but really for themselves, with no guarantee that they're going to get them more revenue. So I do think there should be regulation. I do think there should be rules. I do think they should be registered. You know, look, the NFL has a lot of really good rules, and you have to be a registered agent with the players association in the NFL to be able to represent players. I think families and student athletes should have the same protection in terms of the framework that we put around agents for college kids."
Nick Saban on what Congress needs to get right to protect non-revenue sports
Saban: "Well, I think a lot of the things that we've discussed here today are certainly imperative. I think, in the future, I think if we keep going in the direction that we're going and making these huge investments in football and basketball in terms of paying players, which is going up and up and up and up, that we should change the comment from student athlete to athlete that's a student, because we're going to have professional sports teams that are sponsored by colleges and universities. I mean, that's what's going to happen because we're going to be paying a player so much. And I really think the only way to remedy this is... we have competitive conferences, we have competitive teams. We have competitors involved in trying to create an advantage for themselves in every way that we can. And in college athletics we have no like legislative branch of government that says this is what the rules are. 'I'm the commissioner of the NFL, and this is what you're allowed to do. This is a salary cap. This is how we drive players. This is how we create parity. This is how we create revenue, so that we can maintain a level of competition in all sports, Olympic sports and women's sports as well.' We don't have that in college, so we talk about conferences getting dismantled, and all that. That would never happen if you had somebody that was the head of all this. Right now, like they say back in West Virginia, 'It's not about the money, it's about how much.' And now everything that happens is about how much money can we create, and are we actually deploying that money in the right places to maintain student athletes' well-being?"
Nick Saban on scheduling through "Protect College Sports Act"
Saban: "Thanks for the question, but I've always had the opinion that conferences who historically, in the past, have been regional in terms of how those conferences sort of operated. I think the Southeastern Conference has been able to maintain that. Other conferences have not. I think it is in the best interest of student athletes that we do have regional conferences. I do think a lot of the traditional rivalries come regionally, but I also think that I was always a proponent of everyone having to play in Division 1 schools. Like I was always for having nine or 10 SEC games, and two out of conference games at Division 1 because, you know, we're talking about trying to create more revenue. Well, in creating more revenue, you have to create better inventory that is going to interest people to watch. So, therefore, the more really good games that you have as inventory, the more people are going to watch, the more revenue goes up, the more we can, you know, protect Olympic and non-revenue sports. So, I do think the conferences should be regional in nature, but I do think we should play games of national interest. I don't think it's very fair to to someone playing at USC that they have to go to Rutgers to play a field hockey game or a football game I think that's crazy.
Nick Saban on coaching against Nebraska coach Tom Osborne
Saban: "I will tell you a story about coach Osborne. He's the best. My first game at Michigan State. My first game as a head coach, we played Nebraska when they were winning the national championships, and he was the coach. This is 1995. And we got beat like 56-7, and he put his arm around me after the game, and he said, 'You're not as bad as you think.' And we actually went 6-5, so he was right."
Nick Saban on transfer and eligibility rules
Saban: "We talked about players transferring and having one opportunity, if they graduate, they have another opportunity, if there's extenuating circumstances, they can have an opportunity. We don't want to see student athletes get trapped in a bad situation. But I think multiple transfers, you know, affect a lot of things. It affects ability to graduate, it affects development, it affects what you can major in, and what you can be eligible at at the next school. So I think multiple transfers have a lot of issues that are not necessarily in the best interest in terms of development, being a part of a team. Now, somebody mentioned, 'You're a part of a different team.' We keep asking the young man over here, who's a player at Utah, 'You had three different coaches.' We have guys transferring three times at three different schools in three years, and we act like that's not a problem. What's the difference in that? You got three different coaches then. So I do think that freedom of choice is important, but I do think the combination of the transfer portal and collectives, and being able to have pay for play that creates free agency all the time, is putting 4,000 guys in a portal is not healthy for college athletics, and I don't think, at the end of the day, it's in the best interest of young people in terms of their development.
Nick Saban closing statement
Saban: "Again, I want to say thank you to everyone here to give me the opportunity to be here. This is a pleasure. College football, really college athletics was really important to me as a college coach, and having the opportunity for years and years and years to help young people develop. I appreciate the interest here and the effort being made in continuing to be able to have young people benefit from college athletics."
Colin Gay covers Alabama football for The Tuscaloosa News, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at cgay@gannett.com or follow him @_ColinGay on X, formerly known as Twitter or Instagram @colingaytnews.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Nick Saban Senate hearing transcript on Protect College Sports Act
Source: “AOL Sports”
