Nick Saban said the modern era of college football benefits the Big Ten the most out of all of the conferences. With the transfer portal and NIL the primary goal for roster construction, the Big Ten reaps the awards, per the seven-time national champion coach.
Was Saban honest or was he trolling? Maybe a little of both, as he detailed on Monday’s Pat McAfee Show.
“In this day and age of the culture we have now in college football, paying players, name, image and likeness, transfer, it’s an advantage for the Big Ten,” Saban said. “You’ll never convince me otherwise. The North. Because people in the South would not go to the North unless you paid them.”
Ahead of Indiana–Miami in Monday’s College Football Playoff National Championship Game, Saban conceded a game like this is good for the programs and for the sport as a whole. Of course, he said that before poking fun at the Big Ten, repped by Indiana this year.
“It’s good for college football when teams like Indiana do what they’ve done,” Saban said. “I mean, it’s great for college football. Gives everybody hope that we can turn our program around, we can have success, and we have the right people in the right culture.
“But it’s also great for college football when communities like Miami, the ‘U’ and the tradition that they have, get back into it … there’s a lot of interest in that. So this game, to me, is tremendous for both sides, and whoever wins, it’s going to be great for college football.”
Should Indiana win and finish 16-0, it’d be the greatest turnaround in college football history. Saban actually had some interesting words about the possibility of Indiana regularly being in this position.
“One of the things that these guys are going to have to go through, which Curt’s going to have to go through, is, he has done this phenomenal job in Indiana. Everybody wanted to come to Indiana. People wanted to transfer there,” Saban said. “Everybody wanted to go there because they wanted to prove something. That’s how it was at Alabama. Then, when you win in 2009 and you climbed the mountain successfully, you become the mountain.
“Now, everybody wants to come because of what your program can do for them, and that dynamic changes everything dramatically, in terms of how you got to motivate your players, how you put together your team. Our 2009 team was the first national championship at Alabama.
“Julio [Jones], Mark Barron, all those guys came to Alabama because they wanted to prove something. They were Alabama guys. But, once we won, everybody was coming to Alabama for what Alabama could do for them, and that changed the dynamic dramatically, and that was more challenging for me as a coach.”