I saw this interesting clip on X this evening where Nick Saban makes an interesting point about why he doesn’t think college athletes (football players) should be paid.

I like Coach Saban and have always respected him as a coach. This might be one of the few areas where I feel like I might disagree with him. I’ve always been in favor of the idea of college football players getting paid to play. When both the NCAA and the schools are making 7, 8, 9-figures worth of income on this sports, and ultimately it’s the athletes themselves that are the driving force behind that revenue, they absolutely should get a significant cut of it.

However, I’m also not sure why there has never been established any kind of guidelines as to exactly how those athletes get paid. It’s absolutely straight up negligence on the part of the NCAA to have not established any kind of framework for how NIL should be managed or governed. They are absolutely the reason why NIL is the dumpster fire mess that it is right now.

I’ve always felt like it would be simple enough, and effective enough, to outline a clear set of guidelines for now athletes could earn their pay based on performance. I don’t have any concrete ideas for specifically how this could be measured or applied, but it seems simple enough to me that smart people could come up with a system where, if you play well, you get paid well. If you don’t play much or don’t play well, you don’t earn much.

For the record, I think this should be applied to coaches salaries too. I think it’s ridiculous that there are coaches that get paid eight-figure salaries only to finish the season barely over .500. That just shouldn’t be allowed to happen at all.

I don’t have all of the answers, but I do feel pretty strongly that, given as much money as flows through the college football system, there’s absolutely plenty for someone in charge to choose a handful of smart people and pay them to figure out something that works. There’s really no excuse for that not having happened yet.