Nick Saban defends coaches making more than players in college football
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The Senate has officially passed the Protect College Sports Act, legislation created with the goal of eliminating some of the “chaos” that has affected college sports, and particularly football, in recent seasons. The Act, which now must pass in the House of Representatives, where it is expected to face an uphill battle, would limit player compensation and their ability to transfer freely mulitple times, but has raised concerns from some for not being nearly as restrictive toward coaches or programs.
On Tuesday, former Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban addressed those concerns on First Take.
“These things are totally different markets,” Saban said of the discrepancies between limiting player pay and coach pay. “Like, that’s like asking me, does a student’s scholarship equal the professor’s pay? I mean, how much value does a coach create for a university?…
This morning on ESPN’s First Take, Nick Saban argued player and coach pay are “totally different markets.”
“That’s like asking me ‘Does a student’s scholarship equal the professor’s pay?’ I mean, how much value does a coach create for a university?”
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) September 29, 2026
“You know, rather than worry about amount of money people make, I think the thing that has been difficult is when coaches get fired and they have these huge buyouts. Yeah. And everybody says, well, how can the university afford to pay them that? I think you can figure out, okay, you can’t have any more than A 5-year contract or whatever it is, and maybe the buyout can only be so much. But I think that’s maybe a better way to approach it than try to make these two things—they’re different markets, you know. Players’ market’s different than coaches’ market.”
Saban also defended the PCSA in an appearance on Get Up earlier in the day.
“Well, I think things got out of control based on name, image, and likeness. And look, I want players to make money. I want players to have their own name, image, and likeness,” Saban said. “There’s not any business in the world that can function without a budget and some guidelines. If you ask an NFL owner, what would you do if all your players were free agents every year? Oh, we couldn’t operate.
“What would you do if you didn’t have a salary cap? Oh, we couldn’t operate. We’d go broke. Well, what’s going to happen in college sports is you’re going to either take money from the academic side to support athletics because we’re in a runaway, you know, financial situation, or you’re going to drop other Olympic sports and non-revenue sports that are very important to creating opportunities for young people.
“So this is going to put some parameters on that so that we don’t have to take money from academics. We can still provide opportunities for Olympic and women’s sports, which I think is one of the most important things this does. And we still pay players and they still have authentic name, image, and likeness. So I just think this gives us some guidelines so that we can have some rules and regulations that will actually enhance players’ opportunities to be more successful.”
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