Nick Saban said he didn’t want to talk about satellite camps at the SEC meetings on Tuesday, but he did anyway. He got a bit worked up, too.
Saban has made no bones about it – he’s not a fan of the camps, which allow coaching staffs to travel to other regions of the country (to camps hosted by other schools, including high schools) to scout talent.
But Saban’s main point of contention is a bit different from the usual recruiting-based arguments. Yes, the camps give kids opportunities they may not have otherwise gotten, but Saban is worried about third-party involvement. He compared the camps to the AAU circuit in basketball and pointed to the lack of guidelines for certain things that come with the camps.
"Anybody can have a camp now and if they have a prospect, they can have a camp," Saban said. "Then you're expected to go to that camp and they can use you to promote their camp because Ohio State's coming, Alabama's coming, whoever else is coming. Somebody sponsors the camp. They pay them the money. What do they do with the money? And who makes sure the kid paid to go to the camp? I mean, this is the wild, wild West at its best because there's no specific guidelines relative to how we're managing or controlling this stuff.”
Satellite camps had been previously banned by the SEC and the NCAA Division I Council followed suit with a nation-wide ban in April. However, a few weeks later, the Division I Board of Directors rescinded that ruling and instructed the Council to make recommendations on the college football landscape as a whole – satellite camps included.
Once the ban was rescinded, the SEC expressed disappointment in the ruling but decided to allow its members to participate in camps throughout the summer.
On Tuesday, Saban said the camps contradict the NCAA’s previous stances on third-party involvement in the recruiting process.
“Why would we be promoting somebody else's camp anywhere? Because it's the same thing I said before. This is the only sport where the high school coach still mattered. What they did at the high school mattered. All you're doing is allowing all these other people that we spend all of our time at the NCAA saying, ‘You can't recruit through a third party. You can't be involved with third-party people,’ and that's exactly what you're doing: creating all these third parties that are going to get involved with the prospects and all that,” Saban said.
“And who gets exposed on that? I go to a camp and I'm talking to some guy I don't know from Adam's house cat and he's representing some kid because he put the camp on, and then I'm in trouble for talking to this guy? And who even knows if the guy paid to go to the camp? Is the NCAA going to do that?
“We do that at our camp. We have people responsible for that. They’re called compliance folks. What kind of compliance people do we have at these camps?”
The satellite camp issue came to the forefront of college football discussions when Michigan's Jim Harbaugh put together a lengthy camp tour across the south. Saban made it clear he was speaking about the issue as a whole, not Harbaugh’s practices. And that line of thought brought Saban down another path: whether college football needs a commissioner.
"I'm not blaming Jim Harbaugh, I'm not saying anything about him," Saban said. "I'm just saying it's bad for college football. Jim Harbaugh can do whatever he wants to do. I'm not saying anything bad about him if he thinks that's what's best. There needs to be somebody that looks out for what's best for the game, not what's best for the Big Ten or what's best for the SEC, or what's best for Jim Harbaugh, but what's best for the game of college football — the integrity of the game, the coaches, the players and the people that play it. That's bigger than all of this.
"That's what somebody should do. Now who's doing that? I don't know. Because right now since we have the Power Five everybody's politicking for what they want for their conference. There needs to be a college football commissioner."
Saban had no suggestions for the proposed position.
“I’m not into politics,” he said.
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