SEC Media Day 2010: Nick Saban Doesn't Identify The Right 'Pimps'

At the SEC Media Day, reigning National Championship coach Nick Saban gave his opinion on NFL agents giving benefits to college athletes, comparing them to being no better than a “pimp”.

This comes in the wake of one of Saban’s athletes, Marcell Dareus, allegedly taking a trip to Miami’s South Beach to attend a party funded by an NFL agent.

On top of that, Dareus' travel, lodge, and lord knows was else may have all been funded by said agent.

Although Saban’s statements were perhaps a better comparison than that of a slave master (Jesse Jackson), such statements by themselves were also wrongly directed.

Is this really a case of NFL agents acting like pimps?

Or, as the character Baby Powder in the movie How High put it so eloquently, is this a case where “I’m talkin’ bout pimpin since been pimpin’ since been pimpin’!”

Meaning, who is the real pimp in this situation, and is there really any one “pimp”, exploiter, whatever you want to call it, to blame.

Yes, accepting improper benefits from agents, boosters, whomever, is completely against the rules and morally wrong.

But at the same time, those agents, boosters, and whomever, aren’t the enablers in this situation.

We are.

Not a month goes by, either in or out of season, where ESPN, CBS Sports, Michael Wilbon, and yes, even the Bleacher Report writers (believe it or not), don’t talk about paying college football players, forming unions, turning scholarships into contracts, or just in general about how much money the NCAA is making off the under-compensated backs of their athletes.

There are numerous columnists, radio hosts, and syndicated correspondents who constantly throw out comments in the broad daylight of television and radio regarding how much we rip these kids off.

With the recent talks of the realignment of college football, more than the academics, geographics, or culture of an institution, the big component that would settle the whole debacle was none other than money and how much each school, not athlete, would make in the end.

Yet, even though we complain and put it in the heads of these NCAA players that they should be better-compensated for what they do, when they finally take the matter into their own hands, we throw our arms and voices into the air, bellowing down with the scorn of an upset father.

“How could you?”, “You’re a cheat, a liar, a *expletive deleted*!" (Reggie Bush).

Meanwhile, as Saban stands on the podium, not of the SEC, but of the entire nation of college football fans, and scorns these agents for taking advantage of these young kids and the NFL for not stepping in and talks about how Alabama should cut their program’s ties with the NFL, Olin Buchanan of Rivlas.com notes, behind him scrolls information touting the SEC as a conference that had more players drafted into the NFL last year than any other college football conference.

Why is information about how many players came to the NFL from the SEC at all important to the SEC media day?

Because when you scroll information about how many players went into the NFL, you’re really just telling all the recruits out there that if they come to the SEC, they’ve got a better chance at getting paid.

It's not as though the screen behind Saban is saying Alabama graduated some percentage of players last year or how many of those players were able to become gainfully employed after their four years of playing college football.   

Again, been pimpin’ since been pimpin’.

When Saban steps into the living rooms of these “young people at a very difficult time in their life”, as he put it, he’s not just selling the University of Alabama football program.

He’s using those same statistics that flash on the screen behind him in order to lure the nation’s top athletic talent.

That fact, that opportunity to play in the NFL, is no doubt one of the biggest factors in why any recruit chooses Alamaba as the school they’ll play for in their college career.

And when one of your biggest methods in recruiting kids to your conference isn’t the conference itself, but rather the NFL’s role in that conference, what do you think is going to happen?

They’re not going to show up on campus with the sole purpose of playing for the Crimson Tide, or the Volunteers, or the Florida Gators .

From day one they already have their head in another place.

Why?

Because for a lot of these players, such as last year’s Heisman Trophy winner and Alabama running back Mark Ingram who comes from Flint, Michigan—one of, if not the, nation’s most dangerous cities—they aren’t just “at a very difficult time in their life” as Saban puts it.

They have very difficult lives in general.

When Saban refers to a specific time in their lives as being difficult, unless the timeframe he’s talking about is, well, the whole thing, then he’s missing the mark.

If anything, college is a break from the reality that players such as Ingram live in.

Within the past month or so, five major college football programs have players implicated in accepting improper benefits, money, or the like, and more are sure to come. 

As time goes on, don’t be surprised if these unveilings become not scandals, but like the use of steroids in baseball, the norm.

Rather than the age of steroids, we will all soon be dealing with "The Age of Agency".

With all of the money exchanging hands in the world of college football, it will inevitably exchange hands with those who have the biggest role in creating the game—the players.

We cannot sit here and call college football and the NCAA  businesses and then yell and discipline institutions when their players make business decisions. 

So long as the NCAA, the public, and the media, feed it into the minds of America’s athletes that college football is a business and not a sport, we only have ourselves to blame when the sport becomes exactly that.