Nick Saban has never sounded like a coach eager to share the steering wheel, and on a new BIFF podcast with longtime friend Biff Poggi, he made clear that attitude was baked into the way he ran Alabama from the start.
Saban said that when he took over in 2007, he told people around the program exactly where the lines were. The board of trustees could talk if it wanted, he said, but he wasn’t going to let outside voices shape how he handled the football operation. For him, the mission was narrow: roster building and player development.
"I made coaching so simple," he told Poggi. "I said there are two things that are important: board of trustees, you guys can go do whatever you want, talk about whatever you want, do whatever you want.
But I'm focusing on two things here: not talking to Red Elephant Clubs and all that bullshit. It's how we bring players to our team and how we develop players on our team.
That's all that matters.
"Anything else you want to talk about, you can kiss my ass. That's the way it always was."
That was the same posture Saban described last year on The Pat McAfee Show, when he said, "When I took a job, I said, 'OK, this is how it's gonna be. I'm not listening to the board of trustees.
They're not telling me who to recruit. They're not telling me who to play.'
Understand that going in, and go tell them before I take the job, because I'm not listening to that bullshit."
He also said in 2024, after his retirement, that he "hated" the weekly "Nick at Noon" luncheons that helped raise money for NIL late in his Alabama tenure because they got in the way of his Friday routine before games.
But the bigger point of Saban’s latest comments was not just about boosters or fundraisers. It was about how much the business of college sports has changed - and how much harder it is now for a coach to keep the kind of control he demanded in Tuscaloosa.
Some athletic departments have turned into LLCs, including Kentucky, while others are taking private equity investment, including Utah. Saban said that kind of structure would make his old approach impossible.
"Now we've got all this other stuff happening. How can I say that to a private equity group if I'm a coach? They're gonna tell me, 'You're fired.'"
Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne told Front Office Sports last month that he still has not seen a private equity model that makes sense for Alabama, even though several firms have approached the school. Byrne said last year that private equity would likely tear apart the department’s financial setup, where most sports lose money and football and men's basketball help cover those losses.
Saban’s concern goes beyond who gets the money. It’s about who gets the say.
He warned Poggi that once outside investors own part of the future, the people inside the program can lose the freedom to run things the way they believe they should.
"Everybody that I know that sells a part of their business to private equity in three years, four years and five years -- they are really, really not happy with the deal because the private equity has now control that they have lost control of and they can't run their business like they want to run their business, or whatever," Saban told BIFF. "That's what I fear for colleges that are selling a portion of their future earnings, not knowing whether private equity is actually going to increase value, but they are going to be in a partnership with somebody that is going to tell them how to run their business, and they probably are not gonna like it."
He also questioned whether private equity firms would actually bring expertise that schools don’t already have, and offered a different route: keep the ownership, but hire people to help generate more revenue.
"What I would recommend to them is that they find some resource of the kind of people that they could hire, keep ownership of what you're going to do," he said. "Hire a CEO of whatever you want to call them -- COO, chief operating officer, whatever it is -- in charge of the financial development that we can create at our institution to create more money, but not sell our soul to be able to do that.
Because if there's people in private equity that think they can do that, there's other people out there that think they can do that. I would definitely follow that path before I would ever sell."
Saban closed by comparing the idea to another kind of business deal he said he would never accept.
"Look, we've had private equity try to want to buy -- 'We want to be partners with you and your car dealerships. You got some good locations.
We want to buy 49%.' No, shit ain't happening.
Because then you're gonna try to tell us how to run our business. What do you think is different about this?
I would strongly encourage people to research how can we be proactive in terms of everything we can do to create resources to be able to support the student-athletes that we have and the programs that we have, and continue to try to develop those resources however we can, but not allow somebody else to get ownership of it."
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