Nick Saban reacts to U.S. Senate passage of Protect College Sports Act
· Yahoo Sports
Nick Saban gave his first reaction to the US Senate passage of the Protect College Sports Act Tuesday during ESPN’s Get Up. Monday night’s Senate vote moves the bill another step closer to becoming law. It still needs to pass the House and receive President Donald Trump’s signature. Trump has long supported the legislation.
The bill would grant the NCAA an antitrust exemption to limit athletes to one transfer without penalty, standardize the new five-year, age-based eligibility policy, increase the revenue-sharing cap to nearly $50 million, put more enforcement in place around the rev-share cap, create an agent registry with a maximum 5% fee and allow schools to pool together their media rights, among other things.
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“Well, I think things got out of control based on name, image, and likeness,” Saban said on Get Up. “And look, I want players to make money. I want players to have their own name, image, and likeness. But 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 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.”
Nick Saban approves of Protect College Sports Act
With the act in place, Saban and other supporters could be satisfied with a spending cap, a transfer portal penalty for more than one transfer and controlling coaching movement, at least in terms of the timeline.
“So this is going to put some parameters on that, so that we don’t have to take money from academics,” Saban said. “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.”
The PCSA would limit the Power Four, or conferences that report more than $700 million in revenue, to 20 members. Within the first six years of the legislation’s implementation, any Power Four team wanting to move to a new league must spend three years as an independent. There would not be a time requirement to add a Group of Six or an independent program.
Athletes would be allowed to transfer only one time under the PCSA. Players would be able to transfer in the event of a head coaching change, the discontinuation of a sport or misconduct. The legislation gives the NCAA antitrust protection to enforce transfer rules and prevent tampering.
Pete Nakos contributed to this report