Football – especially college football – does appear to change at the breakneck speed suggesting a spectator society in which there’s little anyone can do about what’s happening around them. Just last week, Alabama’s head coach, Nick Saban, shared a powerful anecdote about the shifting landscape of college athletics.

The former Alabama coach has always maintained that while NIL opportunities can benefit players, they should not overshadow the core mission of college athletics: player development. “All they care about is how much you’re going to pay them, they don’t care about how you’re going to develop them, which is what we’ve always done. So, to me, that was sort of a red alert.” Nick added.

Thus, Saban’s “red alerts” about the risks that the company might face if it fails to see financial value generation as a result of growth investments seem more plausible these days. It is this aspiring college football season that will define the future courses for hundreds of thousands of student-athletes as how college football indeed adjusts or begins to transform itself more rapidly now.

Now, with the NCAA shortening the portal windows this year from 45 days to only 30, Saban’s worries are more apparent than ever. This new ruling is not simply a flip; it is indeed a complete upheaval in how student-athletes manage their careers. The winter window will now run only from December 9th to December 28th and the spring window will run for a week in March only.

Nick Saban said that they used to invite the recruits and their parents over for breakfast, and his wife told them about the all-round upbringing that their sons were going to get at Alabama. Fast forward to now, and Saban’s reflection hits hard: “All they care about is how much you’re going to pay them.” It is a wake-up call that recruiting is not a preserve of the board or the management, as is defined in the traditional job market.

The transfer portal evolution

This means that players will have limited time they will spend making strategic decisions in their careers. With over 2,800 athletes entering the portal last year, the NCAA is attempting to regain some control over roster management, but the question remains: in this case, is this change indeed good for the players? According to Saban, the important thing is to continue the nurturing of young talent. “It was always about developing players, it was always about helping people be more successful in life.”

The NCAA relies on statistics that have been gathered over time, especially in the past few years, to determine that, most athletes transfer within the first few weeks. As Saban aptly mentioned, there is a new world out there and some institutions can secure astronomical NIL dollars to poach players to the existing ‘traditional powerhouses’.

This is not just a story of the NCAA drawing the line; it is the story of what college athletics ideally represent for a generation for which pay-for-play scandals and one-and-done tactics define contemporary collegiate sports. Nick added, “We’re moving in the sort of semi-pro direction in terms of, there’s pay-for-play now. We call it name, image, and likeness, but that’s pay-for-play.” Each of Saban’s observations may well be the jolt that college football must get if the well-being of its student-athletes is the priority.