It's because they're a big part of what college athletics needs saving from.
Saban took part in a Congressional roundtable the other day on What To Do About College Sports, and he lamented that one of the reasons he walked away from Alabama was that "all the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics."
Then he said it was his wife, Terry, who opened his eyes to this one day, asking him why they were still doing this when all these kids today cared about was money.
Made Nick Saban sad.
Nick Saban, whose last contract with Alabama paid him $11.4 million a year to coach football.
Nick Saban, who coached in a conference which negotiated with ESPN to create its own TV network as a fresh revenue stream, and which regularly raids other conferences to add more big-money schools to that stream, and which seems intent on turning high-end college athletics into a Gilded Age monopoly with room only for itself, the Big Ten and perhaps one or two other conferences.
But, OK, sure. It's these damn kids whose greed has ruined college athletics.
Truth is they're just young people doing what young people have always done, which is follow the example of their elders. If they're now saying "Where's mine?", it's because all the grownups around them were saying "Where's mine?"
What Nick Saban and others like him wring their hands over they created themselves, see, and it didn't start the first time a school paid a coach like a CEO instead of an educator. It started the first time that school took a pile of dough to outfit its athletes in Nike swooshes or Adidas stripes, all the while cutting them out of the deal because, after all, they were student-athletes, not employees.
The astronomic TV money and CEO contracts and gutting fellow conferences because enough just wasn't enough swiftly followed, as night follows day. And suddenly the "student-athletes" were demanding to be paid like employees because that's how their schools had come to see them.
Oh, nobody said that out loud, mind you. They all kept up the fiction about education and what-not, even as it got more vaudevillian with every year. Truth is, the "student-athletes" were a workforce like any workforce, generators of massive wealth for what had become a purely corporate entity. Was it really a shock they would eventually begin to think of themselves as a workforce?
And that the corporate entity would be forced to tacitly admit as much, which is how the whole Name, Likeness and Image kerfuffle came into being?
NIL was a half-measure hurriedly conceived and sloppily applied by the NCAA, and it was widely regarded as a sop to keep the full-on professionalism its member schools have courted for decades from overwhelming a shared delusion. Little wonder, then, that it's devolved into a virtually lawless hellscape, with the delusion gone and the NCAA as an enforcing entity thoroughly neutered.
And they've all got no one to blame but themselves. Greed's revenge, you might call it.
Give Nick Saban this much: He at least recognizes the barn door is open and the horse has fled, which is why the other day he said he has no problem with athletes making bank on their name, likeness and image. But he doesn't want to see college athletics become an all-out professional model in which athletes play for pay.
Perhaps someone should tell him that horse is long gone, too. And that it's Nick Saban, former CEO of Alabama Football Inc., who along with his peers turned it loose.
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