Nick Saban lends support to college sports bill as SEC, Big Ten push back

ESPN sportscaster and erstwhile shot manager Nick Saban speaks during the Southeastern Conference NCAA assemblage shot media days Monday, July 15, 2024, successful Dallas. Photo by: Jeffrey McWhorter / AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Alabama shot manager Nick Saban and different assemblage sports figures testified Wednesday successful enactment of a bipartisan measure aimed astatine overhauling a strategy wherever players tin progressively gain millions of dollars portion moving freely betwixt schools.

The leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee held the proceeding arsenic they push legislation unveiled last week that supporters anticipation tin interruption the legislature gridlock implicit however to modulate assemblage athletics.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., would modulate payments to athletes, bounds them to 1 “free” transportation during their careers and make a “Lane Kiffin Rule” restricting coaches from leaving programs during the season. Cruz touted the connection arsenic “the last, champion anticipation we person to prevention assemblage sports.”

“If you had the biggest, baddest Ferrari that you could ever person and it was going 150 miles an hr toward the Grand Canyon, idiosyncratic needs to pat the brakes. And I deliberation that’s what we each request to bash here,” Saban said successful his opening remarks.

Notably absent from the the witnesser list, which included Notre Dame’s diversion manager and the commissioner of the PAC-12 conference, was immoderate typical from the Southeastern Conference, wherever Saban won 7 nationalist championships betwixt Alabama and Louisiana State University

The SEC and the Big Ten, the 2 astir almighty conferences successful assemblage sports, reason the bill, arguing it “leaves captious issues unresolved.”

Cantwell said the authorities is intended to reconstruct contention to assemblage athletics by ensuring occurrence is determined by however universities “build a team, and not due to the fact that they person a billionaire successful their backmost pocket.”

She besides addressed the conferences’ absorption directly, suggesting they fearfulness “that somebody’s going to travel successful and rearrange the platform chairs of those conferences, bargain the eyeball schools, and past fundamentally permission everybody with everything else.”