Alabama Coach Nick Saban on the Relative Importance of Football and School

As university presidents seriously consider canceling or postponing the 2020 college football season, high-profile coaches have been lobbying to keep playing. Nick Saban, head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide and probably the most famous coach in the country, put it this way to ESPN:

I want to play, but I want to play for the players' sake, the value they can create for themselves . . . . I know I'll be criticized no matter what I say, that I don't care about player safety. Look, players are a lot safer with us than they are running around at home. We have around a 2% positive ratio on our team since the Fourth of July. It's a lot higher than that in society. We act like these guys can't get this unless they play football. They can get it anywhere, whether they're in a bar or just hanging out.

Let’s just say that Saban is a better coach than he is an epidemiologist. The line of scrimmage brings players in closer contact than “just hanging out,” and repeated impact creates many more aerosols and droplets than even the most crowded bar.

And of course, Saban’s claim to be acting “for the players’ sake” omits his own stake in the season, for which he will be paid more than $8 million. Although Saban’s contract remarkably does not include a force majeure clause – he is evidently also better negotiator than an epidemiologist – he still stands to lose over $1 million in incentives if the season is canceled. His players, of course, are paid nothing. With the exception of a few NFL prospects, most of them receive “value” only in the form of a free education, and that can be delivered without playing any games – so long as the university honors their scholarships.

But of course, Saban does not really appreciate education, as he explained to ESPN:

But our guys aren't going to catch [the virus] on the football field. They're going to catch it on campus. The argument then should probably be, 'We shouldn't be having school.' That's the argument. Why is it, 'We shouldn't be playing football?' Why has that become the argument?

In other words, school and football are at best equivalents in Saban’s value system (although not really). If his “guys” can’t play football, they might as well not go to school. He seems unaware of the possibility that a perfectly good university could exist without a semi-professional football team, and that his players could benefit from, you know, going to classes.

Let me put it this way, coach. A football team without a university would be the minor league NFL. A university without a football team would be MIT (or Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, or the University of Chicago).