Nick Saban is making one thing clear: the old way he ran Alabama would be a lot harder to pull off in today’s college sports world.
On the BIFF podcast with longtime friend Biff Poggi, published this week, Saban revisited the blunt message he used when he took over in 2007. He said he stripped the job down to two priorities - recruiting and player development - and made it plain that outside voices were not going to steer him.
“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.”
Saban had already said something similar last year on The Pat McAfee Show, where he explained that he made it clear from the start that the board of trustees would not be telling him who to recruit or who to play. He called that kind of interference “that bullshit.”
He also said in 2024, after retiring, that he “hated” the weekly “Nick at Noon” luncheons tied to NIL fundraising late in his Alabama tenure because they disrupted his Friday routine before games.
But the bigger point Saban made to Poggi was about how much college sports has shifted. He argued that the hard line he once drew could now create a very different outcome, especially with some athletic departments turning into LLCs and others taking private equity money, including Kentucky and Utah.
“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 said as recently as last month to Front Office Sports that he has not seen a private equity model that makes sense for Alabama, even though several firms have approached the school. Byrne also said last year that private equity would likely break apart the financial structure of college athletics, where most sports lose money and football and men's basketball help cover the rest.
That concern is exactly where Saban’s warning landed. He said schools may be tempted to use private equity to help meet rising player acquisition costs, but that giving away control can come back to bite them.
“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 then laid out what he thinks schools should do instead: keep control, bring in the right people, and build revenue without handing over ownership.
“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 that thought by comparing it to a deal private equity once floated for car dealerships he knew well.
“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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