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Ever since USC and UCLA announced their plans to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, college football realignment has been a major talking point in the sports world. Of course, Alabama coach Nick Saban had to weigh in and he has concerns.
“My biggest concern is competitive balance,” Saban said on the Always College Football podcast. “The NFL—which I was involved in for eight years—every rule they have is to create competitive balance and if they could have every team go 8–8 so at the end of a season every team was playing their last game to get in the playoffs they would be ecstatic. Because how much fan interest does that create?
“We don’t have any guardrails on what we’re doing right now,” he continued. “We have no restrictions on who can do what. Some people are gonna be capable of doing certain things other people aren’t going to be capable. But the bottom line is we’ll lose competitive balance. Which everything we’ve always done in college football is to maintain competitive balance. Same scholarship, everyone had to play by the same rules whether it was recruiting or whatever. Right now that’s not how it is.”
The SEC is also the subject of another major realignment with Oklahoma and Texas slated to leave the Big 12 and join the conference by 2025. Because of all the movement, Saban is also concerned that classic rivalries will suffer due to obvious schedule changes.
“There’s a lot of tradition in conferences that will no longer exist,” he said. “I think we’ve gone through that to some degree in the past, the Oklahoma/Nebraska game used to be a big game and they’ve not been in the same conference for quite some time now. But I think we’re going to deal with it a greater capacity than ever before because I think mega-conferences are probably here to stay.”
After what has happened in the last year, it’s hard to argue with him.
