Is this what's best for the college athlete?
I’ve always considered myself a pretty prudent person when it comes to money. I believe my wife Melanie would testify to that.
My life experience has played a role in that philosophy of course. I grew up poor by just about any measure and also knew that any money we did manage to accumulate as a family could be gone in an instant.
But most of my philosophy has been built over time in the working world. Keep in mind I do not dig ditches or dodge improvised explosive devices for my pay, but I feel that I receive an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work and you never know when it’s going to rain.
The 53-year-old me believes this. The 20-year-old me had a different outlook. I can remember being on campus at the University of Alabama in 1990 and coming across a random table where a kid just older than me was asking students to sign up for a credit card.
The pitch was a good one. He asked me a little bit about my situation and I told him I commuted an hour each way to school. He told me I needed a credit card for emergencies. He told me I could really never know when I may not have cash on hand and would need a tank of gas to get to school. He told me the credit limit was small so I could never really get in trouble. He told me I seemed like a pretty level headed guy so it wasn’t like he expected me to spend frivolously anyway.
I hit my $800 limit within a few months. Yes, I placed a few tanks of gas on the card. There was also a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and a Hammer/Boyz II Men concert ticket (don’t judge).
I had to learn, over time, how to manage money. I had been in charge of my own finances for only a year or so and I didn’t have that skill.
Baby steps. One of the biggest lessons I learned in my college years came through deprivation. And that’s typically where a lot of the most important, lasting lessons are learned.
This week, former Alabama football coach Nick Saban spoke at an NIL Roundtable hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Watch the whole thing here. He said the injection of large amounts of money into the recruiting/retention process short-circuited his ability to teach lasting life lessons to the players on his team.
To paraphrase, Saban said he believes the college experience — in this case the college sports experience — is primarily about development.
Saban preached a two-pronged philosophy to recruits and their families during his coaching career:
(1) Over the course of three years (maybe four), the recruit is going to be developed to the highest extent possible to succeed in a career in professional football. This is going happen through a multi-faceted delayed gratification process. You may have been a 5-star superstar at your high school, but you may grind away on the second or third team for a year or two before ever starting here, and you’ll be the better for it. You may want to satisfy the itch to do this or that in your leisure time, but if you hop into the weight room and put in a lot of work you’d rather not do, you’ll be the better for it.
(2) Over the course of three years (maybe four) the recruit is going to be put in the best possible position to make the right life decisions, regardless of whether that person earns a living as a professional football player or not. This, also, is going to happen through a multi-faceted delayed gratification process. Over time, the lessons learned on the field, in the meeting room, in the weight room and in numerous workshops/lectures will create an ethic in the player that will become a worldview. This worldview will serve the player after college in whatever occupation he decides to pursue.
We know this works more often that not because we hear from many, many former players who return thanks to their coach for the life lessons learned in their college years. Saban isn’t the only one who works to instill these ethics into his players. Almost all college coaches try to do the same thing. It just so happens that Saban’s success has allowed him a platform to make his philosophy known on a grand scale.
Several college football pundits criticized Saban for his roundtable comments. Saban said that players who come onto campus with six or seven figures in their pocket are more difficult to coach because they are not willing to participate in the deprivation or delayed gratification model of learning.
Critics described Saban as the out of touch old man who is content with making $10 million per year off the backs of college athletes who make little or nothing in comparison.
And that is the crux of the argument. What is the college experience supposed to be about? If you believe the college years are the beginning of your career, then you probably favor anyone — in this case college athletes — making whatever they can.
If you believe the college experience is preparation for career/life then you want to see a better structure than what exists now in college athletics.
Critics believe those who are not happy with where things are now are just jealous. They believe that because when we were in college and ate Ramen noodles on Tuesday, the $3.99 Godfather’s pizza buffet on Wednesday and the $.39 per cheeseburger special at Burger Express on Thursdays, we envy the Lamborghini-driving college student.
Maybe some do, but it isn’t my concern. My concern is this: In the current state of college athletics where NIL rains down on top athletes as an inducement to play at a certain school, will these 18-year-olds be the best version of themselves at 35 the way things are now, or the way things were before?
Arguments can be made both ways, but I believe the college athlete is served best the way things were before. Keep in mind that only one percent of college football players will make a living playing professional football. That leaves thousands of college players who will need to develop skills at other things to be in the best position to succeed. No one close to the game believes the overwhelming majority of these athletes are more concerned about academics now than five years ago.
But if you believe the most important thing is that a tiny number of these athletes finally get paid for the revenue they help generate, then the game is exactly where you want it.
This, of course, is just an intellectual exercise. We are never going back to the $100 handshake days of college football. Although Saban criticized the current state of college football, he knows we’re not going back and he wants to do what he can to make the best transition to what college sports is going to be in the next 5-10 years.
Maybe that means collective bargaining between players and schools or conferences. At least that way the school can argue for some common-sense restrictions. And if college athletes become school employees, then they’ll be subject to that state’s work laws.
So maybe you still believe Saban is the greedy old man that bought $18 million lakefront homes and Mercedes dealerships at the expense of teen exploitation. It’s easy to think that from a distance. The overwhelming majority of his players, I believe, would think otherwise.