Former coach says college football is broken and that's the reason Nick Saban stepped away

The way to build a roster changed over Nick Saban's time as coach.

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Sun Jan 14 07:00:05 GMT-04:00 2024

Gene Chizik says that one of the reasons Alabama head coach Nick Saban stepped away from the game, and others will follow, is that college football has turned into a “me sport” and is “miserable” right now.

Chizik, who once coached at Clemson (GA/OLB in 1988-89), was recently let go by North Carolina’s Mack Brown after four seasons in Chapel Hill. Chizik was a guest on SiriusXM earlier this week and asked about Saban and the current landscape of college football.

Ever the optimist, even Chizik thinks that college football is broken.

“I always try to see things as a glass half full. But college football is broken right now. Flawed system. I just left it. And that's one of the reasons that I did leave it,” Chizik told Chris Childers and Rick Neuheisel. “And I could coach right now if I wanted to. I could be at several different places doing this. But I think one of the reasons Nick stepped away is know you get into this because you love team building, you love putting together and developing a football. Well, you know, back in the day before the transfer portal and all of the NIL stuff started, you could actually do that. You could outwork somebody in recruiting, you could build the team. From the beginning you knew that when you got that team, put together that for the next three or four years you had a foundation built. Well, that's no longer part of the equation. And I think that's one of the things that Nick loved, right? He's a competitive guy.

“He had a system, he had a way about doing of evaluating and recruiting and plugging guys in and he loved that part of it. If you listen to him, he always talked about creating value for his players. And the way he did that is he put them in an environment, and he built a team that was built on developing guys, bringing them in. You know what? You may not play your first year, but year four, you're going to be a first round draft pick. And you can say that because it happened over and over again. Well, the problem with that now is that doesn't necessarily exist.

"I just got done coming out of situation where you can recruit a kid literally for a year and a half, he can be yours for nine months. As far as a verbal commitment goes and somebody swoops in and says, look, I'm going to offer you 'X' amount of money and they're going to take the money and you can't say you blame them, but it's flawed. And if we don't get this under control, it's unsustainable. It's unrealistic. The game has gone from being a team sport to a me sport.”

Chizik said that while the product on the field is still fun to watch, it’s not fun for coaches.

“I don't think anybody likes it. Now when you look at the product on the field and you just turn the TV on and then you turn it off, maybe you don't see a much different product than you've seen before, but where the product has changed, is that the way you go about doing your job and the way you about going and approach your business from a coaching standpoint,” he said. “And it's not fun. Matter of fact, it's miserable at times, and there's not a coach out there that would disagree. So that's where I'm at. It's a flawed system, and it must be fixed.”

In his opinion, more coaches will follow Saban’s example and step away.

“It's very flawed, and we're seeing coaches dropping like flies no matter which sport,” Chizik said. “I mean, Mike Krzyzewski did the same thing in basketball. Roy Williams, Jay Wright, who had a lot of tread up on the tires, still said, screw this.”