Congratulations, Nick Saban. No one thought, after taking Alabama to the BCS Championship in college football, that you could top yourself so soon. But boy, you pulled it off. The biggest hypocrite in the United States for the month of July. Great job, champ.
Here's Nick at an SEC press conference this week, griping about how rules violations at three SEC schools, Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina, threaten the sterling reputation of the Southeastern Athletic Conference. He could blame himself, or the huge financial pressures on college sports programs that exploit college athletes for millions and pay them nothing. But why do that when you can find a scapegoat, the professional sports agents who make payments to players to induce them to sign on with their agencies:
I don't think it's anything but greed that's creating it right now on behalf of the agents. The agents that do this — and I hate to say this, but how are they any better than a pimp? I have no respect for people who do that to young people. None. How would you feel if they did it to your child?
Pimps. You are calling sports agents pimps. If your hair wasn't so neatly coiffed, sir, I'd swear you ddn't have a mirror in your home.
At the risk of sounding like an incredibly weak Saturday Night Live bit -- Really, Nick Saban? Really? You get paid $4 million a year to coach the Alabama football team. And that doesn't include the tidy profits you get for endoresments, television specials, personal appearances, and no doubt, book deals.
What do your players get? Zero. The nearly 100 players who actually went on the field and earned that national championship get nothing for their efforts except a scholarship to Alabama. As as for that, the way you make them show up for work every day -- yes, I call it work -- is by threatening to take said scholarship away from them if they don't show, regardless of their level of academic achievement. There's priority for you. Football over education.
And judging by past graduation rates at the University of Alabama, that scholarship isn't worth much. In 2009 Alabama graduated 67%, which isn't terrible, but still doesn't impress me when you consider that these kids got 4 years of education for free, something I would have killed for, and still a significant number of them couldn't make it through.
In the four years before 2009, Alabama's graduation record has been shameful: 39%, 44%, 49%, and 55%. This is pathetic for a conference that averages over $50 million in spending on its athletic programs per year. Fifty million dollars a year and the school still fails at what is supposed to be its primary objective, graduation, one third of the time.
We all know what college football players get degrees in. Kinesiology. Sports management. General studies. I'm not trying to knock these degrees -- they are, after all, better than nothing -- but the point is that the majority of college football players who graduate at all are mostly qualified to do nothing but coach football. If those 50% were getting out with degrees in accounting or even philosophy, I wouldn't complain. But a vanishing few college players leave Alabama (or most other big college programs, for that matter) with an education that allows them to live in the non-jock world, which is about 99% of it.
Reportedly Saban is a college grad himself, having received a degree from Kent State. Perhaps at Kent State someone taught him that a pimp is somebody who profits off the selling of others.
In other words, a 4 million dollar a year college coach.