Nick Saban highlights what Dabo Swinney-Pete Golding tampering standoff says about state of college football

Former Alabama head football coach and current ESPN analyst Nick Saban appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday morning in support of the bipartisan “Protect College Sports Act” co-authored by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

During his opening remarks, the 74-year-old seven-time national champion coach diverged from his prepared remarks several times to make a point about many of the issues plaguing college athletics today, and he cited several recent incidents to highlight his point.

That included harkening back to this January’s recruiting dust-up between Clemson‘s Dabo Swinney and Ole Miss‘ Pete Golding to address the evolution of tampering in the day and age of the the transfer portal. Swinney famously called out Golding and the Rebels for their “blatant tampering” of linebacker Luke Ferrelli, a Cal transfer who had committed to Clemson and was already taking classes on campus when Ole Miss first reached out in a late attempt to flip his commitment in the final days of the two-week portal window in late January.

“Clemson had a player that was on campus for a whole week and (Ole Miss) came and got him off the campus and took him someplace else,” Saban said during the hearing entitled “Protecting College Sports: Supporting Student Athletes, Restoring Fair Competition, and Saving the Games Fans Love.”

“These kinds of things going on in college football are absolutely not what any of us signed up for, relative to the educational institutions that we’ve all tried to represent.”

While Saban didn’t comment on or call out Ole Miss or Golding specifically, his citing of Ferrelli’s recruitment reinforced his overall point regarding the need to establish standardized rules around player movement, and the undue influence agents have with regard to player transfers.

“Unlimited transfers creates free agency, and free agency with a collective, now you’re talking about a bidding war for players,” Saban added. “And then you have agents out there that are not certified, that are encouraging players to get in the portal (because) I can get you more money. Now we have this unbelievable number of players that get in the portal every year and we have nothing to control agents, and we have nothing to control tampering.”

Ultimately, Saban defended the bipartisan “Protect College Sports Act” as a potential answer to many of the ongoing issues plaguing the sport he dedicated more than five decades of his life to. The bill provides several protections for student-athletes, as well as delivering limited antitrust protections for the NCAA to reestablish control over player movement, including limited the number of transfers an athlete can make.