Former Alabama head coach Nick Saban praised President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at addressing the issue of pay-to-play payments to college athletes.
Appearing on Fox & Friends on Friday, Saban said something needs to be done about the wild costs falling on college sports departments.
The president signed an Executive Order to set restrictions on payments to athletes from third-party sources, stating, “any revenue-sharing permitted between universities and collegiate athletes should be implemented in a manner that protects women’s and non-revenue sports.”
“I think President Trump’s executive order takes a huge step in providing the educational model, which is what we’ve always tried to promote to create opportunities for players, male and female, revenue and non-revenue, so they can have development as people, students, and develop careers and develop professionally if that’s what they choose to do,” Saban said.
“I think we sort of need to make a decision here relative to do we want to have an education-based model, which I think the president made a huge step toward doing that, or do we want to have universities sponsor professional teams? And I think most people would choose the former,” he added.
“I think the clearing house is there to authenticate name, image, and likeness. In other words, is your marketing value relative to what you’re getting paid to do a marketing opportunity? When you cross that line, that’s when it becomes pay for play,” Saban said. “So you have collectives that raise money that pay players, and they really don’t do a relative marketing job to earn that money, and that’s where this whole thing has kind of gotten sideways. I think this whole clearing house is there to sort of protect the collective, affecting competitive balance in college sports.”
“I’m for keeping all the sports that we have as many as we can have, but there are financial concerns relative to how many sports can you promote that don’t create revenue,” Saban continued.
“I think one of the things people need to understand about college sports, they say it’s a business, but it’s really not a business. It’s revenue-producing, and two sports have created the revenue to have 20 other sports. And I think that’s why it’s important we have a system in place. I think President Trump’s made the first step…that would protect the opportunities that we’ve been able to provide male and female non-revenue sports. I think it’s everybody’s goal to keep all those opportunities intact,” he concluded.
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