What Nick Saban believed in for 50 years 'no longer exist in college athletics'

Retired Alabama football coach Nick Saban didn't mince words.

Sen. Ted Cruz asked Saban during an NIL roundtable on Tuesday in Washington D.C. how much the current chaos in college athletics contributed to his decision to retire in 2024.

"All the things I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics," Saban said. "It was always about developing players, it was always about helping people be more successful in life."

Then Saban brought up a recent conversation he had with his wife, Terry Saban.

"My wife even said to me, we have all the recruits over on Sunday with their parents for breakfast," Saban said. "She would always meet with the mothers and talk about how she was going to help impact their sons and how they would be well taken care of. She came to me like right before I retired and said, 'Why are we doing this?' I said, 'What do you mean?' She said, 'All they care about is how much you're going to pay them. They don't care about how you're going to develop them, which is what we've always done, so why are we doing this?' To me, that was sort of a red alert that we really are creating a circumstance here that is not beneficial to the development of young people."

Saban said that's always why he did what he did and why he preferred college athletics over the NFL. He always wanted to develop young people.

"I want their quality of life to be good," Saban said. "Name, image and likeness is a great opportunity for them to create a brand for themselves. I'm not against that at all. To come up with some kind of a system that can still help the development of young people I still think is paramount to the future of college athletics."

Nick Kelly is the Alabama beat writer for The Tuscaloosa News, part of the USA TODAY Network, and he covers Alabama football and men's basketball. Follow him @_NickKelly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.