Nick Saban might be done patrolling a sideline, but he isn’t done challenging the sport he helped define.
Now an analyst on ESPN’s College GameDay, the seven-time national champion is pushing a simple, sweeping idea: college football needs a real boss. Not a committee, not a loose alliance of conferences—a single commissioner with authority over the entire sport, backed by a competition committee that can standardize how the game is run.
‘We don’t have that right now’
In Saban’s view, the mix of NIL money, constant transfers and conference realignment has pushed college football into a gray area where everyone has power and no one has control. He argues that without a centralized voice setting rules and expectations, the sport drifts.
Saban contrasted the current setup with an earlier era in which scholarship agreements spelled out academic standards, transfer expectations and long-term commitments between players and schools. Those guardrails, he believes, have been eroded to the point that the sport is flirting with chaos. If you’re not backing stronger structure, Saban suggested, you’re effectively siding with “a little bit of anarchy.”
The focus and money surrounding the College Football Playoff, in his mind, have only masked deeper structural problems.
Is Saban the obvious choice?
Saban isn’t alone in calling for a commissioner. Last year, James Franklin—then at Penn State and now at Virginia Tech—publicly argued for exactly that role and even floated Saban as the ideal candidate, saying college football needs someone who wakes up and goes to bed thinking only about what’s best for the sport.
Whether the job ever exists, and whether Saban would actually want it, remains an open question. But his message is blunt: college football is at a crossroads. For the former Alabama coach, the next era can’t just be about bigger TV deals and a larger playoff. It has to start with someone finally grabbing the wheel.