nick-saban Page 6 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

NIL turns 1
It’s been one year since the NCAA adopted a name, image and likeness (NIL) policy, allowing its “amateur” athletes to monetize and benefit off their own personal brands and make money over the table. This is all while attending one of their institutions and donating endless time to their athletic pr...

Nick Saban just bought — I mean flipped — a former Texas A&M QB commit
Last week, Nick Saban said that NIL is how former assistant and current Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher “bought every player on their team.” This week, Saban got an ESPN 300 quarterback recruit to commit to Alabama after he was originally supposed to play for Fisher in College Station....

Lane Kiffin tells the truth about college football
Lane Kiffin isn’t the hero college football wanted, and certainly not the one we thought we’d get, but he may just be the hero college football needs. The 47-year-old Ole Miss coach has watched the SEC drama of the past week play out in a sort of shocked delight (a man of the people), and in an inte...

College football teams have always bought players
The Nick Saban-Jimbo Fisher feud is a microcosm of the two schools of thought in college football right now. Texas A&M beat Alabama for the top recruiting class in the nation this year and one coach, Saban, was none too pleased, saying, “A&M bought every player on their team.”...

College football anarchy is creating more have nots than haves
The road to the College Football Playoff got more direct Wednesday with an announcement from the NCAA that conferences with at least 12 members were no longer required to decide their football champions by splitting its league into two divisions and the winners compete in a conference championship g...

Hey, Nick and Jimbo, the NCAA is on line one
Now that the tornado of dust whipped up by that Jimbo Fisher press conference has somewhat settled (don’t worry, there’s still plenty of other kinds of dust still floating around), the reality of what just happened is setting in. As thrilling as it was to watch adult men worth millions get up in fro...

Jimbo Fisher declares war on Nick Saban in press conference for the ages
You know what? Maybe everyone getting along wasn’t so great after all. When you think about it, there haven’t been any real true, deep-down, openly public, hate-filled coaching rivalries in college for awhile. Jimbo Fisher blew all of that up today in about 11 minutes, between 10:04 and 10:15 a.m. c...

NFL Draft Day provides a welcome rebuke to the NBA’s player empowerment era
It’s a widely known fact that Kyrie Irving is delusional. He’s a man of the people while walking among them unvaccinated. He thinks the Earth is flat, and has the NBA figured out even though he’s essentially a losing player without LeBron James. However, when he said he was going to keep “managing” ...

Jay Wright’s retirement heralds a culture shift in college sports
Where have all the coaches gone?...

Losers don’t get cake at Alabama
I have no problem with winners getting things that losers don’t. Participation medals should be called what they really are: Door prizes. Thank you for showing up and giving Billy and Timmy someone to beat on for an hour or so, now go eat your complimentary Nature Valley bars in the parking lot with...

Can we please get an LS-U <em>30 for 30</em> already?
It’s hard to quantify what makes a thing charismatic. I recently went to New Orleans for the first time, and before I arrived, I was a little skeptical because often when people can’t shut up about how great something is, the expectation is set so high that anything but perfection is going to be a l...

Here’s a solution for college coaches pissed off at the transfer portal
College coaches griping about the transfer portal and NIL deals turning college athletics into the Wild West is the new salmon crudo, aka a dish that’s so popular and served so often that Padma and Tom made fun of its omnipresence during an episode of Top Chef....

Dabo Swinney: My locker room is my transfer portal
Spring game season is upon us, and the college football programs that didn’t hold their annual glorified practices last weekend are scheduled to put them on this Saturday. It’s a nice way to catch a nap, check in on a quarterback battle, or get a sneak peek at any coaching changes....

Legendary coaches hand picking their successors is a great idea, until it isn’t
Tonight will mark the final time Mike Krzyzewski coaches a basketball game at Cameron Indoor Stadium after 42 seasons as Duke’s head coach. It’s a game against archrival North Carolina, with Hubert Davis patrolling the other sideline in his first season guiding the Tar Heels after the retirement of ...

It hasn’t taken Kim Mulkey long
With only two games left in the regular season, the LSU women’s basketball team sits at No. 8 in the national rankings. Sitting second in their conference, behind consensus No. 1 South Carolina, we can finally, confidently say that the Kim Mulkey-led Tigers have turned things around. ...

The path to an NBA championship is increasingly volatile
Neil Young gets credit for the line, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” but Kurt Cobain made it infamous. That dichotomy stuck with me, and it’s impossible not to see it in sports....

NFL award winners haven't been Super in the big game
Super Bowl LVI will feature four NFL Honors Awards winners: Cincinnati’s Ja’Marr Chase (OROY) and Joe Burrow (CPOY) as well as the Rams’ Cooper Kupp (OPOY). Rams’ offensive tackle Andrew Whitworth also won the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, but that’s not important for the context of this pie...

Auburn keeping Bryan Harsin, this should totally work out well
For better or for worse, Auburn is saving themselves from throwing $18 million down the drain (for now), announcing Friday that Bryan Harsin will remain the Tigers’ head football coach into the 2022 season. Harsin has had quite the week, one that started out by trending on Twitter for having an affa...

A Matt Stafford victory is a win for all mid-career professionals
During the summer of 2006, I was a fledgling student journalist baking under the blistering sun at a preseason practice at UGA, capturing B-Roll of a fellow pimply-faced true freshman from Texas. The quarterback phenom was about to be the talk of the SEC. Matthew Stafford’s singular talent created r...

I know just the coach for Auburn
The writing is on the wall for Bryan Harsin at Auburn, to the point where Paul Finebaum is openly speculating about Hugh Freeze coming in from Liberty — after five years of SEC exile — to take the Tigers job....