Nick, stop pocket-watching.
A few months after Nick Saban stuck his foot in his mouth when he threw a temper tantrum because NIL was leveling the recruiting playing field, Alabama’s head football coach recently became the highest paid in his profession at a public university due to a raise and an extension that will pay him $11.7 million per year. According to Front Office Sports, Saban’s new deal lasts until Feb. 28, 2030, and is valued at $93.6 million over eight years. It also means that in 2029, Saban will earn $12.7 million at the age of 79.
Wow.
All of this for a guy that was consumed with everyone else’s money back in May.
“We were second in recruiting last year, (Texas) A&M was first,” Saban said at the time, as he complained about how it was inconceivable that he could be beaten in recruiting. “A&M bought every player on their team, made a deal for name, image, and likeness. We didn’t buy one player, but I don’t know if we’re going to be able to sustain that in the future because more and more people are doing it.”
Saban then aimed at Deion Sanders’ program.
“Jackson State paid a guy a million dollars last year that was a really good Division I player to come to school. It was in the paper. They bragged about it. Nobody did anything about it,” Saban claimed, all because he can’t understand why the No. 1 recruit in the country — who is Black — would ever want to go to a Black school and play for a Black coach. Newsflash, Jackson State doesn’t have that kind of money. If they did, the HBCU wouldn’t be dealing with a water crisis that’s crippled Mississippi’s state capital — which is affecting the football program.
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Ironically enough, UGA head coach Kirby Smart is who Saban surpassed in salary, as it was Smart’s team that beat Saban’s in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game.
“Our family is very happy to agree to a contract extension with The University of Alabama,” Saban said in a statement. “Terry (Saban’s wife) and I are very appreciative of the unmatched commitment the University has shown to this football program and our family over the last 15-plus years. This is our home, and we look forward to finishing our career at Alabama.”
To Saban, all that matters is that he gets his first. Then everyone else can eat.
“The biggest concern is how does this impact and affect recruiting?” Saban said in July. “On the recruiting trail right now, there’s a lot of people using this as inducements to go to their school by making promises as to whether they may or may not be able to keep in terms of what players are doing.”
A few months before Saban said that he flipped a former Texas A&M QB commit — Eli Holstein, a 6-foot-3, 215-pound QB from Louisiana — to the Crimson Tide.
“You give a young man … $8,000 a month or $6,000 a month, you can say, ‘He deserves that.’ Well, he might deserve that if he earns it, if he goes out there and plays,” Kirby Smart told folks at Texas High School Coaches Association annual convention in July. “I’m all for taking care of guys that have been part of the program and start and play. It’s just that it’s a reverse system right now, where the bottom coming in are getting rewarded more than maybe the top going out. And … that makes it really tough.”
From Kirby Smart and Lane Kiffin to Saban, rich college football coaches became suddenly concerned about the amount of money pouring into the sport when the players started getting a small cut — that doesn’t include any from the lucrative media rights deals. It’s a reminder that this entire system was built on the backs of unpaid teenagers, and despite how much “progress” and “change” has been made over the years, it’s clear that college football is a sport in which the people who do the least and make the most, don’t want the people who do the most and make the least, to ever get theirs.
So when Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide are having their way with the Utah State Aggies on Saturday — as Bama is favored by more than 41 points and has a 99.3 percent chance of winning according to ESPN’s matchup predictor — know that Saban will probably be spending the second half concerned with how much money Bryce Young’s NIL deal is paying him per game instead of how many incompletions the Heisman Trophy winner has thrown.
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