Nick Saban made a surprise appearance on Get up this week, nominally to promote his upcoming ESPN documentary.
However, during the segment, Saban had the opportunity to react to the U.S. Senate’s passage of the Protect College Sports Act, which the former Alabama head coach helped craft and heavily promoted. On Get up and later First takeSaban made several arguments that were hotly contested by opponents of the bill.
Saban claimed that athletic departments could “go out of business” without the PCSA, and argued that coaches’ salaries do not need to be capped under the new set of rules because they are a “totally different” market than players’. When asked why players weren’t involved in crafting the bill, Saban responded, “I really can’t answer that question,” before later expressing that collective bargaining still might not “fit” into the college sports ecosystem.
Standing off the board during Saban Get up Interviewing was ESPN analyst Domonique Foxworth, probably sports media’s foremost authority on labor dynamics. Foxworth is a former NFLPA president and NBPA staffer, and was recently interviewed to be the executive director of the NFLPA.
Apparently, as Foxworth explained on Thursday The right time podcast, he wasn’t happy when he found out he couldn’t participate in the interview.
“I didn’t know he would be there. I asked and we talked about what we could do in the future on this specific topic,” Foxworth said. “But in the moment, of course, I was respectful, whatever, I shook his hand. I didn’t agree with it, but I didn’t really weigh in.”
Foxworth added that he “wished someone would have given him some perspective” and was moved to offer a retort in the intro to his own podcast the next day.
“I had to go do something on my show because I felt so disgusting,” he explained.
“I wasn’t on set. If I’m on set, I have to ask. They broke from our usual routine. Get up structure to do, like, a one-on-one interview with him about his documentary. And then he inflated this bill, and… I talked to Greeny and he said he hadn’t read much about it. And I just said I wish someone would give him some perspective. So I went home wondering: What would I have done if I had had time to prepare? And I boiled it down to one simple question.
“Who has the authority to make the rules and change them and enforce them. And the answer will be…it’s basically going back to the way the system was in the NCAA.”
To his and ESPN’s credit, later in the morning, Stephen A. Smith did a much more effective job questioning Saban about the bill.
But on his podcast Wednesday, Foxworth attempted to combat the simplistic notion that the PCSA “protects” college sports. Instead, he argued, the bill is an attempt by coaches and administrators to regain control.
“The powers accumulated by the players are completely gone,” he said.
Gn sports
