Nick Saban lends support to college sports bill as SEC, Big Ten push back

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Alabama football coach Nick Saban and other college sports figures testified Wednesday in support of a bipartisan bill aimed at overhauling a system where players can increasingly earn millions of dollars while moving freely between schools.

The leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee held the hearing as they push legislation unveiled last week that supporters hope can break the congressional gridlock over how to regulate college athletics.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., would regulate payments to athletes, limit them to one “free” transfer during their careers and create a “Lane Kiffin Rule” restricting coaches from leaving programs during the season. Cruz touted the proposal as “the last, best hope we have to save college sports.”

“If you had the biggest, baddest Ferrari that you could ever have and it was going 150 miles an hour toward the Grand Canyon, somebody needs to tap the brakes. And I think that’s what we all need to do here,” Saban said in his opening remarks.

Notably absent from the the witness list, which included Notre Dame’s athletic director and the commissioner of the PAC-12 conference, was any representative from the Southeastern Conference, where Saban won seven national championships between Alabama and Louisiana State University

The SEC and the Big Ten, the two most powerful conferences in college sports, oppose the bill, arguing it “leaves critical issues unresolved.”

Cantwell said the legislation is intended to restore competition to college athletics by ensuring success is determined by how universities “build a team, and not because they have a billionaire in their back pocket.”

She also addressed the conferences’ opposition directly, suggesting they fear “that somebody’s going to come in and rearrange the deck chairs of those conferences, steal the eyeball schools, and then basically leave everybody with everything else.”