Nick Saban made a surprise appearance on Get Up this week, nominally to promote his forthcoming ESPN documentary.
During the segment, though, Saban conveniently had the opportunity to react to the U.S. Senate passing the Protect College Sports Act, which the former Alabama head coach helped craft and has heavily promoted. On Get Up and later on First Take, Saban pushed several arguments that are strongly contended by the bill’s opponents.
Saban claimed athletic departments could “go broke” without the PCSA, and argued that coaches’ salaries did not need to be capped as part of the new slate of rules because they are a “totally different” market than player pay. Asked why players were not involved in crafting the bill, Saban said, “I really can’t answer that,” before later expressing that collective bargaining still might not “fit” in the college sports ecosystem.
Standing off set during Saban’s Get Up interview was ESPN analyst Domonique Foxworth, likely sports media’s foremost authority on labor dynamics. Foxworth is a former president of the NFLPA and staffer at the NBPA, and recently interviewed to be the executive director of the NFLPA.
Apparently, as Foxworth explained Thursday on The Right Time podcast, he wasn’t pleased when he found out he could not participate in the interview.
“I didn’t know he was going to be on there. I asked, and we talked about what we could do in the future on this specific topic,” Foxworth said. “But in the moment, of course I was respectful, whatever, shake his hand. I disagreed with it, but I hadn’t really weighed in.”
Foxworth added that he “wished somebody would have gave him a little push-back,” and was driven to offer a retort in the intro to his own podcast the following day.
“I had to go and do something on my show because I just felt so gross,” he explained.
“I wasn’t on set. If I’m on set, I have to ask the question. They broke away from our normal Get Up structure to do, like, a one-on-one interview with him about his documentary. And then he pumped that bill, and … I talked to Greeny and he said he hadn’t read much about it. And I just said I wished somebody would have gave him a little push-back. So I went home wondering, what would I have done if I had time to prepare? And I boiled it down to one simple question.”
“Who gets the power to make the rules, to change the rules, and enforce the rules. And the answer is going to be … it’s essentially reverting back to the way the system was in the NCAA.”
To his and ESPN’s credit later in the morning, Stephen A. Smith did a much stronger job grilling Saban over the bill.
But Wednesday on his podcast, Foxworth attempted to combat the simplistic idea that the PCSA is “protecting” college sports. Instead, he argued, the bill is an attempt by coaches and administrators to claw back control.
“The powers the players had accrued is completely gone,” he said.